The Sycophancy Must Be Televised

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As for Trump, his performance, too, seemed right out of the Kremlin playbook. As the meeting dragged on, I remembered Vladimir Putin’s tradition of a marathon annual press conference, in which he holds forth on matters as varied as street cleaning and the perfidy of the West. Putin’s all-time record for one of these appearances, set in 2008, was four hours and forty minutes, so I guess there is still something for Trump to aspire to. In the end, Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting clocked in at three hours and seventeen minutes, which, if it did not beat Putin, was still significantly longer than “The Godfather,” as was quickly noted. (Can you imagine the Rotten Tomatoes score if audiences were actually forced to watch Tuesday’s meeting in full?) The first Cabinet member to be called on, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not get to speak until more than forty-eight minutes had elapsed. The first questions to the press did not come until nearly two and a half hours in.

There is a strong argument to be made for not wasting time with what followed. We already know that this live-streaming President is addicted to his own show; of course, he’ll let it run as long as possible. As for the rest, it’s hardly a revelation that Trump’s fellow cast members are so desperate for a bit of his airtime—and approbation—that they’ll say anything to get it. Besides, it’s been a week with so many other truly extraordinary developments emanating from the Trump Administration, “a Watergate every day,” as the author Garrett Graff put it. Does another Trump talkfest actually rate?

An incomplete catalogue of events since my last Letter from Trump’s Washington would include the White House’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a governor of the independent Federal Reserve; the attempted ouster of Trump’s new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and subsequent resignations of several senior officials in protest of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies; the President’s threat to expand his militarization of domestic policing from Washington to other Democratic-run cities such as Baltimore and Chicago; a federal takeover of Union Station; a new executive order purporting to ban flag-burning in defiance of Supreme Court decisions ruling that it is constitutionally protected free speech; Friday-evening purges of senior officials in the intelligence community who contradicted the Administration’s propaganda; and the President personally demanding the prosecution of his former friend Chris Christie after Christie said something he did not like on television. And that’s the partial list.

With so many truly existential threats to the democracy unfolding during what is supposed to be the final vacation week before the post-Labor Day rush, it seems almost wrong to get worked up watching a hundred and ninety-seven minutes of Trump and his team of “butt-snorkelers,” as the retired Army General Ben Hodges memorably called them.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-sycophancy-must-be-televised