Donald Trump's New Reality Show
Previously known as a cabinet meeting
At the end of last week’s cabinet-meeting celebrating the Trump Administration’s first 100 days, Donald Trump actually said something that appears to be true: “Nobody has ever done public cabinet meetings.” The reason, Trump surmised, is that “they weren’t impressive, especially the last administration.” An alternative theory would be that, for all that the White House staff runs modern administrations, presidents, including Joe Biden, hold cabinet meetings to help them make decisions. Such discussions are best conducted privately. This one was more on the order of the boss hearing from his caporegimes. The boss went around the table, and his soldiers told him where they’d been and how much DEI they’d eliminated. The boss addressed the camera; the capos addressed the boss.
Nevertheless, a cabinet meeting reimagined as a TV show–Cabinet!--offers the viewer insight into how life looks inside a regime. Whatever dread Trump’s operatives may feel, the dominant mood was: We’re doing, like no one’s ever done before. “Most presidents,” said JD Vance, who appears to be the resident formulator of Large Thoughts, “they’ve been place-holders. They allowed their staff to sign executive orders with an auto-pen.” (No extra credit for identifying that president.) Since he had been born forty years ago, Vance said, American manufacturing had run down, the American military had lost its mojo, the border had become a sieve. “What’s happened in the last hundred days,” he added, “we’ve started to reverse every one of those trends.”
Show ‘N’ Tell In The White House
Cabinet members had fanned out across the nation and seen the President’s words become deeds. “Our Secretary of Commerce went down to Arizona,” Trump told the camera. “Howard, could you describe what you saw?” Secretary Lutnick had seen something incredible–the beginnings of a $65 billion investment in a chip factory by Foxconn, the Taiwanese giant. “This is all driven by your tariff policies,” Lutnick told the president. “No chance that would be happening” otherwise. (In fact, Foxconn had first invested $12 billion in the Arizona plant in 2020 and had added to the sum since then.)
There was so much more in Cabinet!, including what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “recruiting renaissance” in the military, which had been “demoralized” under Biden. When his turn came, Vance added, “We now have people breaking down the doors to join our military.” Why, he asked the media, were you ignoring that stunning evidence of revitalization in order to focus obsessively on “the fact that we deported an MS-13 gang member with a valid deportation order?” (Probably because military recruiting had in fact increased 12.5 percent in Biden’s last year in office. At the time Army Secretary Christine Wormuth observed, “Concerns about the army being quote `woke’ have not been an issue in our recruiting crisis.” It’s true that the military is doing even better so far this year.)
Trump’s lieutenants love to feed him stories about the crazy things the Biden Administration allegedly did in the name of wokitude. They relate these stories in the spirit of can-you-believe-this-one? Did you know, asked Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, part of Trump’s stable of handsome young guys with excellent hair, that his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, had funded research into “more equitable and sustainable” outcomes for “women and gender-nonconforming”? We are, he said, “clawing that back.” The boss pursed his lips appreciatively. The Department of Agriculture was studying “transgender mice.” Not any longer. HUD had “prioritized illegal immigrants over the American people” in rental housing. “We have prioritized the American people,” said Scott Turner, who, in case you didn’t know, is the HUD secretary.
Inside this largely self-enclosed thought-world it is possible to believe things that would not stand up under even the most trifling scrutiny. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has excellent platinum hair, said that thanks to the vast quantity of fentanyl pills and compounds seized by DOJ enforcement officials, “we have saved–are you ready for this, media?--258 million lives.” Why isn’t the media reporting that? Hmm. Since about 70,000 Americans died from fentanyl last year--a figure, by the way, that represented a 14.5 percent decrease from the year before–Bondi was claiming that henceforth no Americans would die from fentanyl for about the next four thousand years. Or maybe half as many would die over the next eight thousand years. What matters is that, as the Attorney General also said, “Mr. President, your first hundred days has far exceeded that of any other president in the history of the country.” Trump looked duly solemn.
The Era of Tolerating Perverts Is Over
I did learn a few things worth knowing from watching all two hours of Cabinet! Doug Collins, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, said that he had been talking to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about “opening up the possibility of psychedelic treatment” for vets. I’m hoping that’s a yes. CIA director Tulsi Gabbard, whose thick raven locks make her look like a Marvel superheroine, boasted of having revoked 67 security clearances and of making three criminal referrals for leaks to the media with eleven more “under investigation.” Gabbard also noted that, “Just the other day we found seven hundred alien terrorists.” That ought to save the lives of at least 258 million Americans.
Elon Musk continues to outrank everyone; the proof is that he takes the liberty to clown. Each cabinet member had a Gulf of America hat–red with white lettering or black with red lettering–placed in front of them. No one touched them, save Musk, who put on both when Trump turned to him in order to make a joke about wearing many hats. Musk left it to others–to almost everyone, in fact–to enumerate his accomplishments. Trump said, “You’ve been treated very unfairly,” and added, “you’re invited to stay as long as you want”--at which point the room burst into applause.
The session ended with Marco Rubio, now the capo di tutti capi, with more hats than even Musk. Rubio looked like a mini-me in the same blue suit, white shirt, red tie that Trump was wearing. At that moment Michael Waltz was still national security advisor, and earlier in the meeting Waltz had done his level best to hang on by telling Trump “we’ve had 100 days of leadership with respect, with strength,” etc. Apparently it wasn’t enough. Rubio, vastly more adept at the art of the suck-up, mocked “thirty years of foreign policy that was based on what’s good for the world”--including, that is, George W. Bush, until just the other day Rubio’s shining star.
Rubio said no more about world affairs than had Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard. He did, however, note that “the President was elected to get rid of a bunch of perverts and pedophiles and child molesters.” He seemed to be referring to immigrants, not Democrats. “The only people who disagree with us,” Rubio concluded, “are a handful of federal judges and a bunch of crazy people who are paid to write and report.” That would be the journalists whom Trump had invited to witness the performance, and with whom Rubio had once been on very friendly terms.
Reasonable people wonder why the cult of Trump has not loosened its hold on most of his acolytes. Cabinet! was a brilliant exercise in propaganda, a real-time demonstration of Donald Trump’s dominance and, if you believed all the malarkey, of inexorable progress in his work of radical renovation. There is, of course, a real world out there in which the sky is falling. But not in Trumpworld; there harmony reigns. How long can the fiction hold? One shudders to think.