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Jay Shackford
The Sycophancy Must Be Televised
By Susan Glasser/The New Yorker
August 28, 2025
When Donald Trump began to speak on Tuesday, during what would become the longest televised Cabinet meeting ever, he did not exactly advertise his plans to make history. There was a lot of the usual Trump palaver about how windmills are “ruining our country” and about the transformative power of his tariffs, which, he insisted, will completely revitalize the American economy. “It’s going to happen like magic,” he vowed. “It’s going to happen without question.” Standard stuff, at least for Trump 2.0, with the President’s top advisers gazing adoringly as Trump vamps for the cameras.
But, in hindsight, the warning signs were there. For starters, it was more than seventeen minutes before anyone else said a word at the meeting, and, even then, the speaker—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—only managed a “Yes, sir” before Trump resumed speaking. No one else said anything of substance after that for another fifteen minutes, at which point the President called not on a member of the Cabinet but on Iris Tao, a reporter for the Epoch Times, a far-right news organization linked to an exiled Chinese opposition movement. “I heard you were very savagely mugged in the city,” he said, inviting her to recount the episode. She did so, recalling a terrifying incident of a man in a ski mask striking her in the face with the butt of a gun, and concluded with profuse thanks to the President for his decision to send in federal troops to fight crime in Washington. “Thank you for now making D.C. safer,” Tao said. “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 at the White House, now that Trump’s staff has taken control of the formerly independent press rotation and started deciding on its own which news organizations get access to the President. The Kremlin press pool could not have played the moment any better.
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.
Nonetheless, dear reader, I watched. And, I would argue, it was worth every excruciating minute.
Trump, like any narcissist who is handed a microphone before an adoring audience, can’t help but reveal. One thing this Cabinet meeting and other recent appearances have shown is a President who is openly riffing as never before about his unchecked reign. “Not that I don’t have the right to do anything I want to do,” he explained at one point, while elaborating on his plans to expand troop deployments. “I’m the President of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.” He also commented, as he had a day earlier, on critics who say he’s acting like a dictator with his police power grab. “Most people say, ‘If you call him a dictator then . . . if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants,’ ” Trump said, before adding, “I’m not a dictator, by the way.”
Aside from his almost palpable delight that so many people have finally figured out he’s a world-class strongman, Trump could not restrain himself from admitting what lies behind the performative anti-crime spree that he’s launched in Washington—the prospect of a winning issue in next year’s midterm elections. “I think crime is going to be a big thing,” he said, two hours and thirty-six minutes into 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 midterms. And I think the Republicans are going to do really well.”
As is often the case, though, Trump’s biggest reveal is what he shows about those around him; he is a mirror, and not a flattering one, for other people’s souls. In that category, few on Tuesday could top the Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who invited Trump to come see his own “big, beautiful face” mounted on a huge, Putin-style banner flying on the outside of her department’s headquarters. “You are really the transformational President of the American worker,” she told him. Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, offered some stiff competition, though, as she waxed poetic about Trump’s contribution to the history of the Republic. “I do believe we’re in a revolution,” she said. “1776 was the first one, 1863 or so with Abraham Lincoln was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way. And we are saving America.”
Neither of them, however, could overshadow the day’s most riveting performance, by Steve Witkoff, the Trump golf partner turned global envoy. Witkoff, a real-estate lawyer by training whose apprenticeship in diplomacy has so far produced neither peace in Gaza nor an end to the war in Ukraine, offered a rousing paean to the boss. “I just don’t think you get the proper credit for it all,” he said, which is just about the most perfect pitch to make to a man for whom no recognition will ever be sufficient. Witkoff, in addition to proving himself a champion among champions in sycophancy, also showed some real skill during his short speech in another Washington art—that of goalpost-shifting. It was just this month that he and Trump spoke of an imminent deal to end the conflict in Ukraine, which they hoped to seal by rolling out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska. Two weeks later, with no deal, no ceasefire, and no foreseeable prospects of even a follow-up meeting between Putin and Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, which Trump had said would happen right away, Witkoff slipped into his remarks a new deadline for progress: “before the end of this year.”
Not that it matters. Witkoff told Trump that he already should go down in history as the greatest of all peacemakers. “There’s only one thing I wish for,” he said, “that the Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate” ever for a Nobel Peace Prize. “Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody one day wakes up and realizes that,” he concluded, a finale that caused the entire Cabinet to break out in applause.
If only it had ended there. But there’s no editing Trump now. The show doesn’t end until he says it does. There’s an awful lot of tape to run until noon on January 20, 2028. ♦︎
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast. She is also a co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”
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