Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

President Donald Trump basically told Americans last night that he’s going to make sure we can have our cake and eat it, too—and by the way it will be a spectacular cake, it won’t cost much, and it’s going to help us lose a lot of weight.

Trump used his first speech to Congress last night to lay out a heroic vision of an America where “every problem can be solved.” He promised to ensure clean air and water while getting rid of environmental regulations. He vowed to ratchet down taxes on corporations and the middle class while jacking up spending on the military, immigration enforcement, infrastructure and veterans—and at the same time somehow rescuing America from its crushing national debt. He suggests that he'll increase tariffs on foreign goods, and that foreign countries would respond by lowering tariffs on U.S. goods. And he pledged to replace Obamacare with terrific reforms that “expand choice, increase access, lower costs and provide better health care.” He didn’t explain in much detail how those reforms would work, or whether they would also do something about those embarrassingly skimpy gowns patients have to wear in the hospital.


The media takeaway was that Trump’s speech sounded optimistic, which was true compared to his dyspeptic inaugural address, and also true in the sense that infomercials promising baldness cures or eight-minute abs are optimistic. But there’s a fine line between optimism and magical realism. Politicians routinely deploy sunny rhetoric about “cures to illnesses that have always plagued us” and “American footprints on distant worlds,” but Trump was playing a high-risk game by promising just about everything to just about everyone—especially when he also declared that “above all else, we will keep our promises to the American people.”

In the real world, policy choices have trade-offs. For example, Trump vowed to kill Obamacare’s individual mandate, but he also complained that insurers are abandoning the Obamacare exchanges—a problem that would only intensify if the mandate went away, and young and healthy consumers weren’t required to buy insurance. He suggested he could fix the problem by lowering the overall cost of health care, but in fact Obamacare has already helped bring health care inflation down to its lowest level in half a century. As for the big goal of "repeal and replace"? He handed that ball to Congress, where some Republicans want to eliminate many of the subsidies that have helped Obamacare cover 20 million additional Americans as well as the new taxes on the wealthy that helped pay for it, and other Republicans hope to preserve some of Obamacare’s benefits for the working poor. It’s not clear how they’ll pass anything, much less how they could pass—or even think up—a cost-cutting, tax-cutting, coverage-expanding, care-improving plan that squared Trump’s various circles.

Similarly, after taking shots at President Obama over the growing U.S. debt—even though the annual deficit that better measures fiscal responsibility shrunk by two-thirds on Obama’s watch—Trump proposed a slew of measures that would make deficits and the debt much worse, from “massive tax relief” to “one of the largest increases in defense spending in American history” to new investments in paid leave and women’s health. He’s a salesman, not a wonk, and he’s never expressed much interest interest in the details of the policies he’s pushing. Washington insiders chuckled this week when Trump suggested he only recently learned that health care is complicated, but when you’re hawking Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir, you don’t necessarily want to scrutinize the ingredients too carefully.

There was a telling moment last night when Trump recalled how Harley-Davidson employees visiting the White House told him they’re getting crushed by foreign tariffs, and Trump vowed to fix that. “They weren’t even asking for change—but I am,” he said. In fact, Harley-Davidson’s CEO has asked for change in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade deal that would have drastically reduced some of those tariffs, the very same “job-killing” deal that Trump boasted about scuttling in his speech.

The potential problem for Trump is that policies have consequences, and Americans who believed his “I alone can fix it” rhetoric might start expecting him to deliver on tax reform, Obamacare repeal, a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and other promises that will require congressional assistance. They might eventually check whether his claims that “dying industries will come roaring back to life” and “our terrible drug problem will slow down and ultimately stop” ever came true.

But Trump also provided a glimpse of how he might deal with those expectations: Fudging statistics and declaring victory. Last night, he continued to portray the nation he inherited from Obama as a hellhole, bemoaning how 94 million Americans are out of the workforce, a wildly misleading figure that includes senior citizens, high school students, stay-at-home parents who choose not to work and adults too disabled to work. He noted that America has lost one-fourth of its manufacturing jobs since the passage of NAFTA, neglecting to mention that it regained 800,000 manufacturing jobs under Obama. At the same time, he bragged that his jawboning of companies like Intel and Boeing is already creating “tens of thousands of new jobs,” which, even if it were true, would be a blip compared with the 16 million new jobs America has added since 2010. Trump came into office at a time of low unemployment, rising wages, and decreasing poverty, not to mention low crime rates, record high school graduation rates, plummeting teen pregnancy rates, and historically modest rates of illegal immigration. It’s only a matter of time before Trump points to all those data points as evidence that he’s made America great again.

It just might work. The marketing genius behind the flim-flam of Trump University and the success of Trump resorts is the kind of gifted salesman who can make his supporters believe not only that America was engulfed in “lawless chaos” under Obama, but that his creation of a Task Force on Reducing Violent Crime will impose a new sense of order. And even though his promises to reduce the debt by slashing taxes and boosting spending may be mathematically dubious, they’re as American as eight-minute abs. Most Americans aren’t policy wonks. And most Americans like their politicians sunny. They like to hear, as the president said last night, that “a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp.”

In the realm of legislative procedure and regulatory bureaucracy, it’s not entirely clear how optimism can make the impossible possible. But in the realm of politics and prime-time speeches, it probably does make the impossible sellable.