Donald Trump hosted his first White House Cabinet meeting in June 2017, and observers didn’t seem fully prepared for the spectacle — or the degree to which it departed from American norms.
As regular readers might recall, the president went around the room, offering each member of his team an opportunity to genuflect about how happy they were to be associated with him. The result was nothing short of creepy. John Harwood, apparently flabbergasted, said at the time, “Honestly this is like a scene from the Third World.” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and his staff quickly put together a satirical meeting in the New York senator’s conference room, mocking the tone and the rhetoric of Trump’s gathering.
Though it hardly seemed possible, eight years later, the conditions have become even more cringe-worthy. The New York Times published a great analysis of the Republican’s latest Cabinet meeting:
There in the Cabinet Room — which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. 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 Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
Over the course of three and a quarter hours, the public saw a megalomaniacal authoritarian, eagerly telling his team how awesome his awesomeness is, followed by sycophantic secretaries declaring their fealty to him and his greatness.
We’ll probably never know how much of the obsequiousness was sincere and how much of it was driven by fear, with officials realizing that insufficient groveling might lead to their ouster. Either way, the list of examples of cult-like rhetoric from the White House Cabinet Room was not short.
In one especially memorable example, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — who recently spent thousands of dollars on a giant picture of the president that now hangs on the front wall of the Department of Labor’s headquarters — told Trump, “Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker. ... I was so honored to unveil that yesterday.”
Months ago, there were some concerns on the right that Chavez-DeRemer might not be a reliable enough Trump ally. Those concerns seem to have since been assuaged.
For Americans, a display like this one is jarring and unfamiliar, but for some international audiences, the White House gathering might seem more familiar. As The Washington Post reported, “The meeting ... bore similarities to meetings of ministers in other countries where leaders have sought to exert strong, personal control over large stretches of national life, scholars said, including in Russia and Turkey.”
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, the director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and a former intelligence analyst in the first Trump administration focused on Russia, told the Post, “It is definitely a widespread phenomenon with a lot of these personalist leaders.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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