The death of dignity
By 
Trump held a “cabinet meeting” today that went well over three hours in his garish Washington D.C. bordello, which consisted of escalating rituals of abject ass-kissing with the occasional conspiracy theory thrown in:
As the hours ticked by, Mr. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.
Mr. Kennedy then engaged Mr. 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 Mr. Rubio, who in his spare time is Mr. 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, Mr. Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Mr. Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Gaza conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a Gazan hospital. He suggested again that Mr. 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. Trump circled back to his envoy and frequent golf buddy. Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Trump said, had reassured him that he was the only person who could solve the Russia-Ukraine war.
“I don’t know,” Mr. 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,” Mr. Trump said.
He added: “It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”
Like much of what was said on Tuesday, this was transparent but not truthful: The legislation overwhelmingly benefits top earners, and has adverse effects for low-income households.
What’s scary is how committed you have to be to some combination of looting and destroying the federal government to be willing to put up with even 20 minutes of this.