Analysis: What, exactly, was that Cabinet meeting?
WASHINGTON – What do you get for a president who commands everybody’s attention, all of the time?
For members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on Tuesday, the answer was apparently this: a televised meeting at the White House that lasted almost half the workday.
In front of a wall of cameras, the old “Apprentice” host offered a clear window into the way he was running his administration, starting with an ego that appeared to need frequent feeding, and blustery stamina: “This has never been done before,” the president said at one point, in between calling on secretaries to speak and marveling over the waiting reporters’ abilities to hold microphones and cameras aloft for several hours.
There in the Cabinet Room – which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Trump’s Oval Office – all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
That list is as ever-growing as it is specific to Trump’s pet peeves and political ambitions. It includes preventing “transgender for everybody” in U.S. sports; using a heavy hand – perhaps the death penalty, the president said – to crack down on violent crime; the ongoing threat of windmills; the foul state of traffic medians; the speed with which water flows; and the attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to grow by the day.
Trump, a pop culture maven, had relatively little to say about what was arguably the biggest news of the day: the engagement of Taylor Swift, whom he has publicly insulted and threatened for not supporting him, to Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. The event rattled on for so long that the president was asked to comment on news that had broken during the meeting.
“I wish him a lot of luck,” Trump said. “I think he’s a great guy, and I think that she’s a terrific person. So I wish them a lot of luck.”
The Cabinet event was billed as a celebration of American workers before Labor Day. Yet with a running time of 3 hours , 15 minutes, it would be considered a wildly inefficient meeting at just about any other workplace. The actual policy menu was just gristle in comparison to the red-meat politics, but for an afternoon, the Trump White House really was as radically transparent as Trump likes to say it is.
“There’s something really nice about just, you know, the openness of what we’re doing,” Trump mused as he closed the gathering out. “It’s government.”
He also seemed interested in dangling the idea that, at any moment, his Cabinet members could be humiliated on national television: “Each one of these people spoke,” Trump said, apparently happy (whew!) with their performances. “If I thought one of them did badly, I would call that person out.”
He even threw them a compliment for torching their daily schedules: “These people are very busy!”
As the hours ticked by, Trump’s Cabinet members highlighted the cost – in hours, in money, perhaps in karma – of keeping a seat at his table. And many did so while testing the apparently imaginary boundaries of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities on the job.
The updates ranged from enthusiastic – Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary, implored the president to come to her agency to look at his own “big, beautiful” face on a banner – to servile, and they went on for hours.
Occasionally, policy peeked in, but only in a way that allowed Trump to tack on his own thoughts or to take a hard right turn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the onetime presidential challenger and current health and human services secretary, issued an update about shrimp contaminated with radioactive material, accusing South Asian nations of “dumping shrimp” that was then packaged and sold at Walmart.
“You are going to save the whales,” Kennedy, who once sawed the head off a whale and drove it home, said while railing against the dangers of wind farms and wind energy, a long-held peeve of the president’s.
Kennedy then engaged Trump in a back and forth about rates of autism in young boys, allowing the president to wonder aloud if there was “something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something,” repeating a widely debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and opening it up to an even vaguer interpretation.
In other moments, some of the truth behind all of that radical transparency revealed itself, like when Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that this year’s Labor Day held a special place in his heart.
“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Rubio, who in his spare time is Trump’s national security adviser, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“That’s true,” the president replied.
And then there was Steve Witkoff, a billionaire whose praise was so slavish that even the president seemed to pick up on the overkill. During his turn, Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Hamas conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a hospital in the Gaza Strip. He suggested again that Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.
“There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” Witkoff said.
When he was finished, the billionaire received a round of applause from his colleagues. During a later question-and-answer session with reporters and far-right news personalities, Trump circled back to his envoy and frequent golf buddy. Witkoff, Trump said, had reassured him that he was the only person who could solve the Russia-Ukraine war.
“I don’t know,” Trump said, “you’ve told me that a few times.”
The old reality television pro then broke the fourth wall. “Unless he was saying it just to build up my ego. But it’s not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff,” Trump said.
At another point, the president, keenly aware of the power and the perils associated with a brand name, said that he was interested in changing the name of a sweeping piece of legislation he had called the “big, beautiful bill.” He suggested that the fine print of the legislation was lost on the average American worker the Cabinet had gathered to celebrate.
“I’m not going to use the term ‘great, big, beautiful,’” Trump said. “That was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about.”
He added, “It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”
Like much of what was said Tuesday, this was transparent but not truthful: The legislation overwhelmingly benefits top earners and has adverse effects for low-income households.
But never mind. The revolution was being broadcast on live television, in the Cabinet Room, for hours and hours. The president was in control.
For Trump, three hours of nonstop attention was enough. At least for the day.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.