The Sycophancy for Donald Trump Must Be Televised
When Donald Trump started talking on Tuesday, when it was going to become the longest meeting of a television cabinet, he did not exactly announce his plans to make the story. There were a lot of usual Trump Palaver on how windmills “ruin our country” and the transformative power of its prices, which, he insisted, will completely revitalize the American economy. “It will happen like magic,” he promised. “It will happen without question.” Standard stuff, at least for Trump 2.0, with the best advisers of the president looking with adoration the Trump Vamps for the cameras.
But, with hindsight, the warning signs were there. To start, it was more than seventeen minutes before anyone who said a word in Reunion and, even then, the president – the secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent – succeeded a “yes, sir” before Trump resumed to speak. No one else said anything after that for this additional fifteen minutes, how the president did not call a member of the cabinet but on Iris Tao, journalist for the ErasA far -right press organization linked to an exiled Chinese opposition movement. “I heard that you were very wildly attacked in the city,” he said, inviting him to tell the episode. She did it, recalling a terrifying incident of a man in a ski mask striking her in the face with the butt of a firearm, and concluded with abundant thanks for the president for his decision to send federal troops to fight crime to Washington. “Thank you for the moment for making DC safer,” said Tao. “For us, for our families, for my parents, on behalf of my parents, and now my baby on the way. Thank you so much. This is what passes for journalism these days in the White House, now that Trump staff have taken control of the rotation formerly independent of the press and began to decide on themselves which press organizations have access to the president. The Kremlin press swimming pool could not have played the moment better.
As for Trump, his performance also seemed to get out of the Kremlin Playbook. While the meeting was dragging, I remembered the tradition of Vladimir Putin of an annual marathon press conference, in which he is on questions as varied as street cleaning and the perfidy of the West. The record of all Putin’s time for one of these apparitions, established in 2008, was four hours and forty minutes, so I suppose there is still something for Trump. In the end, Tuesday’s firm’s meeting succeeded at three o’clock and seventeen minutes, which, if it did not beat Putin, was much longer than “The Godfather”, as was quickly noted. (Can you imagine that the Rotten Tomatoes score if the public was really forced to look at the full Tuesday meeting?) The first questions to the press came only almost two and a half hours.
There is a strong argument to do so as not to waste time with what followed. We already know that this live president is addicted to his own show; Of course, it will let it work as long as possible. As for the rest, it is hardly a revelation that the colleagues of Trump actors are so desperate for a little of his antenna time – and approval – that they will say anything to obtain it. In addition, it’s been a week with so many other really extraordinary developments from the Trump administration, “a watergate every day”, as the author Garrett Graff said. Is another Trump Talkfest really assessed?
An incomplete catalog of events since my last letter from Trump in Washington would include the White House attempt to dismiss Lisa Cook, governor of the independent federal reserve; The attempted eviction of the new Trump chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the subsequent resignations of several senior officials to protest against the anti-vaccine policies of Kennedy; The president’s threat to expand his militarization of the national police services in Washington to other democratic cities such as Baltimore and Chicago; a federal takeover of the union station; A new decree supposed to prohibit the prohibition to burn the flag in defiance of the decisions of the Supreme Court judging that it is protected by the freedom of expression protected by the Constitution; Friday – the purges of senior officials of the intelligence community who contradicted the propaganda of the administration; And the president personally demanded the continuation of his former friend Chris Christie after Christie said something he did not like on television. And this is the partial list.
With so many truly existential threats to democracy which takes place during what is supposed to be the last week of vacation before the rush towards the day after the tatter, it seems almost bad to meet by looking at a hundred and ninety-seven minutes of Trump and his team of “buttocks”, like General Ben Hodges, the retired army general Ben Hodges.
Nevertheless, dear reader, I looked. And, I would say it was worth every atrocious minute.
Trump, like any narcissistic who receives a microphone in front of a worship audience, cannot help revealing. One thing that this meeting of the cabinet and other recent appearances showed is a president who laughed openly like never before about his uncontrolled reign. “Not that I do not have the right to do anything I want to do,” he explained at a given moment, while developing his plans to widen the deployments of troops. “I am the President of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and that it is in danger in these cities, I can do it. ” He also commented, as he had done one day earlier, on the criticisms who say that he acts as a dictator with his police power. “Most people say:” If you call him a dictator then … if he stops the crime, he can be what he wants, “said Trump, before adding:” I’m not a dictator. “”
Aside from his almost palpable pleasure that so many people finally understood that he was a strong world class man, Trump could not help admit what hides behind the frenzy of anti-crime performance he launched in Washington-the prospect of a winning problem in the mid-term elections next year. “I think the crime will be a great thing,” he said two hours and thirty-six minutes after the meeting. “And we are the party, the Republicans are the party that wants to stop crime … it’s going to be a big, big subject for the community. And I think the Republicans will succeed very well.”
As is often the case, however, Trump’s greatest revelation is what he shows about those around him; It is a mirror, and not flattering, for the souls of others. In this category, little on Tuesday could complete the secretary at work, Lori Chavez-Deremer, who invited Trump to come and see his own “big and beautiful face” mounted on a huge Putin banner flying outside the headquarters of his department. “You are really the transformational president of the American worker,” she said. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, however offered rigid competition, when she targeted poetic on Trump’s contribution to the history of the Republic. “I think we are in a revolution,” she said. “1776 was the first, around 1863 with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, Donald Trump opening the way. And we save America. “
