Anyone who watched the three-hour televised ego project that was Donald Trump’s Tuesday cabinet meeting got a look at how this president prefers to receive information: via sniveling personal flattery verging on outright genuflection.
“Mr. President, I invite you to see your beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor,” cooed Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
“Your respect for law enforcement is so incredible,” gushed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to the man who mass-pardoned some 1,500 Jan. 6 assailants against the U.S. Capitol, including many who assaulted cops.
“I wish … (the) Nobel committee finally gets its act together,” rhapsodized Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, “and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since … this Noble (Peace Prize) was ever talked about.” (So there, Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr.!)
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So it continued, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, America’s walking id of a president eagerly eating it all up like some swaggering boy-king in need of constant adulation. As bizarre as the pathetic display looked to an American audience, it was deeply familiar to citizens of all over the world. “Dear Leaders” can never get enough of being told how dear they are.
What ever happened to speaking truth to power? America has seen that approach toward Trump play out recently as well. And it hasn’t gone nearly as smoothly as Tuesday’s cabinet-meeting-slash-bootlicking session.
The administration on Tuesday suspended more than 30 employees of the for signing a letter to Congress warning that budget cuts to the agency were dangerously undermining two decades’ worth of reforms spurred by FEMA’s catastrophic failures after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The outlines in detail the debilitation effects of FEMA’s foot-dragging approach to natural disasters under Trump and its determination to force states to take over more of the burden for those operations. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” wrote the employees.
The letter was endorsed by more than 182 FEMA workers, but just 36 signed their names, the rest saying they feared retaliation. Ƶ were, of course, right. At least this thin-skinned president’s suspension of those courageous enough to put their John Hancocks on the letter may yet face a legal challenge under whistleblower-protection laws.
The FEMA suspensions were preceded, last month, by a similar purge of for signing a letter decrying the administration’s politicization of the EPA.
As with the FEMA employees, the suspended EPA workers have continued to receive their pay as the administration casts around for a way to give these clearly illegal suspensions some phony patina of legality to stand up in court. So on top of all the other outrageous elements to this story, there is waste of the taxpayers’ money.
But the bigger problem is two-fold: The administration is muzzling the scientific judgment of environmental and disaster experts who understand those topics far better than Trump and his Cabinet full of shameless sycophants do; and they’re violating the First Amendment rights of Americans to do it.
Perhaps the EPA and FEMA workers should take a page from the playbook of those Cabinet lackeys — and from dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin — and just bury Trump in personal flattery until he backs off his attacks on these urgent agencies.
Tell him how “beautiful” he is. Tell him he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize just for being so tough on crime (other than crime against America’s electoral process, of course). Tell him he has great hair and big hands and that only a stable genius like himself can save Americans from pollution and natural disasters.
Or, conversely, they could skip the flattery and try a heartfelt appeal to Trump’s sense of selfless duty to the country he leads.
Just kidding.
