PRAGMATIC ISSUES

America Should Stop Pretending It Was Normal.

There are presidential interviews. There are difficult interviews. And then there is the Politico interview with President Trump which played out like a masterclass in how to detach fully and confidently from reality while expecting the rest of the planet to clap.

Trump appeared under the studio lights with the dazed expression of a man who had fallen asleep in a tanning bed in 1987 and awakened mid presidency in 2025. He declared that prices are coming down which would be news to the millions of Americans currently deciding which basic necessity to give up this month. But who are we to question the emperor of economic fantasy. If Trump says inflation is optional then perhaps oxygen is too.

The interview was not merely unhinged. It was aggressively uninterested in facts. Trump spoke with the breezy confidence of a man who has never in his life bought groceries or paid rent. Although Trump’s own mortgages match his description of mortgage fraud, records show so what would he know about mortgages or rent, exactly?
He dismissed the rising cost of living with a shrug as if the American people were simply being dramatic. He painted a picture of an economy gently drifting downward like a petal in spring. Meanwhile mothers in every state are standing in the grocery aisle calculating whether cereal still counts as a necessity or if their children should simply learn character through hunger.

Then came the part that sent Europe choking on its morning coffee. Trump insisted that Europeans should not fear Russia. No. They should fear their own immigration policies. Picture it. A man who cannot remember which country Putin has invaded, the man who swore during his campaign that he and only he could end the war between the Ukraine and Russia, how many false endings to that war have we heard about this year I have lost track. No Trump is suddenly positioning himself as the calm reassuring voice of continental security. According to Trump the tanks, missiles and assassinations are not the real concern. The real danger is apparently the barista from Morocco who just wants to serve espresso in Milan.

It takes a special kind of delusion to look at Russian aggression and conclude that the true threat is border paperwork. But Trump managed it with ease. He spoke as if he were offering wisdom from the mountaintop while the rest of us stared up wondering who handed this man a microphone and why no one has the courage to take it back.

The interviewers pressed him gently. They attempted logic. They asked for evidence. Trump responded with that familiar blend of word salad and misplaced confidence. Every answer was a passage through a fog machine powered by ego. He drifted from topic to topic like a Roomba with a dying battery. There were moments where he looked almost annoyed that reality refused to cooperate with the narrative inside his head.

What became painfully clear is that Trump now imagines the presidency as a kind of improv theater where he is the star and the audience is expected to shout bravo regardless of the carnage on stage. He is no longer tethered to the lived experience of the country. He does not see Americans wrestling with impossible bills or Europeans shrinking under the shadow of a hostile Russia. He sees only himself reflected in the lights.

The Politico interview revealed something far darker than incompetence. It revealed a man who expects the world to rearrange itself to accommodate his delusion. A man who will look directly at rising prices and insist they are falling. A man who will watch Russia destabilize an entire region and insist the real danger is immigrants ordering tea in French cafés. A man who believes leadership is not about guiding a nation through crisis but about authoring whatever version of reality flatters him best.

This interview should have been a national wake up call. Instead it will drift through the news cycle like another oddity from a man who has turned delusion into a governing style. But make no mistake. A president who cannot tell the difference between fantasy and fact will eventually demand that the rest of us live inside his hallucination.

That is the real danger.

Not inflation.

Not Europe.

Not immigration.

The danger is a leader who mistakes his distortions for truth and expects an entire nation to follow him into the flames.