This Trump Speech Was the Ultimate Loyalty Test
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What is the significance of Trump's latest speech to Congress?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So it is Wednesday morning, March 5th. Last night, President Donald Trump gave his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term. You don't call the State of the Union when it is this early in a term, but that's more or less what it was. And I thought it'd be good to just walk through some impressions of it with my revered editor, Aaron Redica. Aaron, welcome to the show.
Thanks. Hi. Yeah, let's plunge right into it. What did you make of the spectacle? What did you make of the speech? What were they trying to do? What was he trying to do? What was happening there?
I felt that the first 15 minutes of the speech were different than what came after. And in an alarming way. Okay. I don't quite know how to describe this, but I felt like you could feel something rupturing. And I think I described it as you could feel... The rules, the norms, you could feel that we had broken American politics already, and there was now nothing really governing action. And so I'd say that in a couple of different ways. One way had to do with Donald Trump and the Republicans. We will talk about the level of lying Trump did in that speech, the genuinely bald-faced lying, the way that speech came on the day when markets were in chaos.
America's momentum is back. Our spirit is back. Our pride is back. Our confidence is back. And the American dream is surging bigger and better than ever before.
And he's out there saying, it is an amazing golden age. Everything is wonderful.
America is back. Yes!
And you have the Republican Party leaping to its feet, laughing at his every joke. J.D. Vance just radiating Dwight from the office energy up behind him, just chuckling at every dumb joke the boss makes. And then on the other side, you had the Democrats who clearly did not know how to act. They do not feel this moment is normal. They feel, I think, accurately that Donald Trump has seized powers the executive is not supposed to have, powers that are in many cases illegal. I think he's had 20-some injunctions, freezes, et cetera, from the courts already. And so they go to the speech. They had discussed not going at all, but they thought that would be breaking the law. structure, an institution, a norm of American democracy.
Al Green, Representative Al Green, gets up, you know, shaking his cane and yelling at Trump until he gets ejected very early on. Some of the Democrats are waving these stupid little things that look like they're at an auction saying, you know, save Medicaid and, you know, Elon Musk is a fraud. And others were just sitting there on their hands. They didn't know what to do because the rules don't work right now. They don't work on the right. They don't work on the left. There is a renegotiation happening, but not in the sense that the two parties are talking about it. About what kind of system are we in? What is okay to do within it? How do you act if you think the other side has breached those boundaries, but you don't want to burn the entire thing to the ground because you're not sure what will be left if you do that? So I thought that was the first 15 minutes. We can get into what happened after that as he went on, as you described it to me, a Castro-esque stemwinder. Yeah. What did you make of it?
You have more, well, historical perspective on this than I do.
I mean, this is the perennial problem of Trump is like, how do we situate, like, what is this thing, right? It's like, on the one hand, that speech is not unlike the one he made when he first came down the escalator in 2015, right? It's the same enemies, the same allies. That part of it is static, right? What really alarms me about all of this is that the lying is controlled in the sense that he knows what he's saying is not true. The Social Security part of it was a good example.
We're also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on. Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.
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