So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.
And what am I greeted with? Not Morning Joe’s handsome mug (I think it was Don Imus who first noticed Morning Joe’s eerie resemblance to the banjo-playing boy in Deliverance). Not Mika’s permafrost hairdo or that come-hither body language.
No. Instead I am greeted by a video of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. They were shown at a cabinet meeting with President Trump the day before. Each of them, in brief remarks, was saying nice things about the boss. Really nice things, right in front of him.
Chao explained that when Trump visited her eyesore of an office building the week before, “hundreds and hundreds of people were just so thrilled.” Mnuchin said, “It was a great honor traveling with you … the last year and an even greater honor to be here serving in your cabinet.” Priebus laid it on with a trowel: “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing … to serve your agenda.”
After this the camera went to Morning Joe and Mika back in the studio, sitting in what we were to take as stunned silence.
“Whoa,” said Morning Joe. “That was some sad stuff.”
“That was sick,” said Mika. “Am I allowed to say that?”
Yes, you are, Mika. Listen to Morning Joe again: “That is the most sick, shameful, pathetic, un-American, autocratic display.” One of Joe’s on-set sycophant-sidekicks said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had also embarrassed himself at the cabinet session, even though Tillerson had once been a titan of business. Another sidekick said the cabinet members were reading from prepared scripts in lavishing praise on Trump. Morning Joe is a news show, I think, so I assumed this person was telling us a fact. I didn’t catch his name but he wears glasses and sits next to Mika if that’s any clue.
It was left to Morning Joe to spot the silver lining to this sick, un-American display. He evidently found the only cabinet secretary who hadn’t prostrated himself before the president.
“General [James] Mattis stood alone,” said Morning Joe, as if he were giving himself goose bumps, “in doing what you are supposed to do if you served this country and get a paycheck from the American people. He talked about others. Serving others, and not himself.”
On the way to work I tuned in to NPR. “[This] is a story filled with praise,” said the announcer, introducing a news item about the cabinet meeting. He was being jokey, the way those NPR guys are a lot of the time. Next a reporter told listeners that President Trump had chosen “to bathe in the adulation of department heads.” Then the reporter played a mashup of cabinet secretaries saying how honored they were (“an honor to be on the team … deeply honored … what an incredible honor … ”).
The sequence climaxed with Vice President Mike Pence, who, the reporter said, “went first and set the tone.” And sure enough, in that megachurch preacher’s voice, smooth as Brylcreem, Pence said: “It’s the greatest privilege of my life to serve as a vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people and assembling a team that’s bringing real change, real prosperity, real strength back to our nation.” This being NPR, the reporter found a scholar to comment on “the display.” “That’s a more common occurrence in nondemocratic regimes,” the scholar said, “which are trying to portray themselves as being popular.”
At the end, the reporter quoted Priebus: “On behalf of the … senior staff, … we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people.”
But! “Not every cabinet secretary praised President Trump yesterday,” she said. Then, like Morning Joe, she quoted General Mattis. Reporters really seem to like General Mattis.
I got to my office. Everywhere I looked it was the same story: Trump used his cabinet meeting to humiliate his cabinet members by forcing them to heap praise on him as the cameras rolled, and they willingly complied.
I read the New York Times: “One by one, they praised President Trump, taking turns complimenting his integrity, his message, his strength, his policies. Their leader sat smiling, nodding his approval.” Later in the story I read: “One by one, they said their names and—as if working to outdo one another—paid homage to Mr. Trump, describing how honored they were to serve in his administration.” Which is pretty much identical to the previous sentence. The paper must have lost a lot of editors in those newsroom cutbacks.
I went to the CNN website, where the headline read: “Trump Just Held the Weirdest Cabinet Meeting Ever.”
“Trump planned to have every Cabinet member speak,” wrote the breathless CNN reporter. “And when I say ‘speak’ what I really mean is ‘praise Trump for his accomplishments, his foresight, his just being awesome.’ You think I am exaggerating. I am not. Here’s what White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said about Trump: ‘We thank you for the opportunity and blessing to serve your agenda.’ ”
The meeting did sound truly appalling, utterly icky. But then I started to think … wait a minute. If the story was that every cabinet member was puckering up for Trump in public, why did the CNN reporter illustrate the point with a quote from Priebus, the chief of staff, who’s not a cabinet member? And I thought some more. Most of these cabinet secretaries are pretty self-possessed people, proud of their achievements in life, and cravenly kissing up to a boss, even when he’s president of the United States, doesn’t fit the profile.
And so I did what I, as a proud consumer of the mainstream liberal press, am not supposed to do. I second-guessed the mainstream liberal press. I watched the video of the cabinet meeting, all twenty-damn-five minutes of it, and I discovered that every story I had read or heard or seen that morning about the cabinet meeting was, as a whole, wrong or misleading, and in many particulars, just wrong.
For instance: Nobody showed signs of reading from a script. Priebus’s comment was made explicitly on behalf of the “senior staff,” not the whole cabinet, as CNN implied. The Times to the contrary, no one praised Trump’s “integrity.” Neither Priebus’s sycophancy nor Pence’s set the tone of the meeting. General Mattis did not “stand alone”; the sentiment he expressed was expressed by most of his colleagues. And so on and so on and so on.
Here’s what did happen. The meeting Monday was the first time that Donald Trump’s entire cabinet had been in one room, owing to delays in a couple of confirmations. (Democrats’ fault, said Trump.) The president gave an opening statement exaggerating his administration’s accomplishments. He mentioned initiatives begun by several of the cabinet members. Then, to “celebrate this group,” as Attorney General Jeff Sessions put it, Trump suggested they all introduce themselves, the way you do at a business conference or a group therapy session (so I hear).
“We’ll start with Mike,” Trump said, “and just go around and [give] your name and position, and then we’ll ask these folks [the press pool] to go back and have a nice day, and we’re going to discuss our various reports,” which is one of the nicest—meaning, most un‑Trumpian—ways he could have told the press to scram.
There was no hint from Trump that the members should praise him. The most plausible explanation for all the self-introductions was that Trump, knowing the meeting was going out live on cable TV, wanted the public to get a load of the greatest cabinet in the history of the entire solar system—and a lot of other solar systems too, some people are saying.
Pence, who seems most himself when servile, started the praise unprompted. But he didn’t “set the tone,” as the news reports said—his obsequiousness didn’t really catch on at all. In fact, by my count, 11 of the 23 members (counting Pence) didn’t mention Trump at all. The comment from Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was typical: “It’s a privilege to serve, to serve the students of this country, and to work to ensure that every child has an equal opportunity to get a great education, and therefore a great future.”
In a large majority of cases, when cabinet members did mention Trump, the “adulation” was all in the fevered imaginations of reporters. Tillerson: “Thank you for the honor to serve the country. It’s a great privilege you’ve given me.” (Reporter scribbles in her notebook: Suck-up!) Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, a financial adviser worth $2.5 billion: “Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity to help fix the trade deficit and … have a chance to help you live up to your campaign promises.” (Billionaire kiss-ass.) Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats: “It’s a joy to be working with the people that I have inherited, and we are going to continue to provide you with the very best intelligence we can, so you can formulate policies to deal with these issues.” (Boot-licking toady!)
“Their leader sat smiling, nodding his approval,” wrote the Times, but he didn’t. The footage was ill-lit, but Trump’s expression seemed to be the usual jut-jawed, slightly simian expression we’re all trying to get used to. Trump did say “thank you” a lot, as he should have, considering that nearly all of the secretaries said it was an “honor to serve”—not him, but the country, or some public or government constituency. (That’s where the NPR mashup came from, and it’s why it was thoroughly misleading. When a cabinet member says she isn’t honored to serve the public, NPR will have a genuine story.) If even a bare majority of the cabinet secretaries had adopted the tone of Priebus and Pence and Mnuchin, the cabinet meeting would indeed have resembled the Maoist reeducation session the press made it out to be. But they didn’t.
This small episode, this miniature, wholly unnecessary bit of dissembling or incompetence by the press, is a nice example of what Nicole Hemmer, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, has called “Trump Exceptionalism.” It is a disease that strikes journalists above all. In the eyes of the bright young things who work in the White House press corps, with their faulty educations and unearned world-weariness, everything Trump does must be nefarious, and if not nefarious, at least vulgar and unprecedented. It just has to be. So it is. Even when it’s not.
Trump, all by himself, is menacing enough. The press doesn’t help when it sets off undue alarms. After all, wrote Hemmer in Politico, “there’s a cost to getting this wrong. Cry wolf too many times, and readers are less likely to listen when the real dangers appear.”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
