Ezra Klein

But the problem with lying about them, the problem with treating this like a reality television show is most Americans do not tune into you.

And so you can't just lie to them.

I thought that was shocking.

Rent is not down.

Right.

Like anybody who is in the rental market knows rent is not down.

He did cherry pick some things that are down because there were supply chain disruptions during the pandemic on particular goods.

But inflation, it's not crazy.

But it's around what it was in the final year of Joe Biden's presidency.

And prices for Americans have not come down.

He's not done a lot to bring them down either.

But it's a hard thing for any president to bring the price level down.

But he has neither significantly tried nor has he –

And just telling people that you have when you haven't is a dumb move.

You know, Yuval Levin, the conservative policy scholar, I had him on the show a month or two back.

And a point he makes that I think is very sharp about Trump is that Trump governs retail, not wholesale.

That he governs through these individual deals with countries, with companies, not by doing things that change policy for the most part all across the country.

Now, immigration is a counterexample to this, and to some degree, the tariffs are a counterexample to this.

But something you really saw last night was,

was Trump bragging about a series of very individual, usually modest policies, some of which are not even really policies.