Over at Axios, Mike Allen believes that the 2019 State of the Union speech, while superficially unremarkable, actually laid out the basic argument Trump is going to make as the centerpiece of his 2020 re-election campaign: America First vs. Socialism…

If Allen is correct and this is the centerpiece of Trump’s pitch, then it will be an … interesting argument for his supporters to make over the next two years.

For starters, we would expect Trump’s surrogates to argue that 2020 is another Flight 93 election—after all, if it really is the choice between center-right conservative government and “socialism” then it would be a very big deal, indeed.

The only problem is that Trump himself is the most socialist Republican to ever hold office. What is socialism? It’s Big Government and the welfare state on steroids. And not only is Trump for that, but he’s been for it while fighting Republican/conservative/capitalist orthodoxies from the start.