From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, February 23rd.

Here's one way to look at tomorrow night's State of the Union address, And it might be a way that many Republican

members of Congress are looking at it if they're running for re-election in competitive districts.

An article this month in the Atlantic is called Trump is doubling down on all the wrong things.

Republicans are worried about the midterm elections, but the president doesn't seem to be.

The author of that article joins us to begin the

week. It's Jonathan Lemire, staff writer at the Atlantic, and co-host of MS Now's Morning Joe,

and with 10 years now of covering the White House under his belt. Jonathan, always good of you to stay up

way too late for us after your morning show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Happy to be here on this snowy Monday. And we'll get to the fallout from Friday's Supreme Court tariff's ruling. Also are we on the brink of an actual regime change war with Iran.

But I saw you on TV last hour, ticking down the list of bad poll numbers for the president

right now on issues from the economy to immigration to RFK vaccine stuff.

So give us more on the premise of your article before the most watched political event

of the year tomorrow night.

Well, there's no question that what used to be considered Trump's two biggest strengths,

his handling of the economy and his handling of immigration, have now become real political

weaknesses, real liabilities on immigration.

You know, though Americans still are pleased that he largely closed the southern border, they have found, and we ticked through some of those polls in the last hour on Morning Joe, they do not care for the heavy-handed tactics, the mass deportations of non-violent criminals. And of course, these scenes of violence that we saw on the streets of Minneapolis, which claimed the lives of two

Americans. And more than anything, President Trump was re-elected to be a steward of the nation's

economy and combat inflation. And there's a sense from many, including also many who voted for him, that he's simply not doing that,

that he's taken his eye off the ball. He's focused on the wrong things. And I know we'll dive

into the tariffs in a few minutes, but even this is insistence that the tariffs should be put in

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