Donald Trump held another televised meeting of advisers on Thursday, where his team leaned in to the sycophantic image that has come to define the president’s second-term operatives.
The president himself, meanwhile, was unsatisfied with merely basking in the glow of his advisers’ praise and instead turned to members of the right-wing press for comfort — while he simultaneously bullied mainstream journalists, backed up by the agreeable chuckles of his allies.
Billed as a presidential announcement on a human trafficking task force, the event instead mirrored Trump’s recent on-camera Cabinet meetings. The president was surrounded by allies, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Stephen Miller and others as they took turns, individually, laying out why he was such a great president.
Each member of Trump’s team seemed in competition to use the most outlandish rhetoric to praise their boss, with Miller and Bondi in top contention.
"Let me just say, Mr President, that this country was going to die without you. This country was going to actually die without you,” declared Miller.
Bondi put the acclaim in historic terms: “We all work so well together. I don’t think another administration in our nation’s history has worked so well together!”
Trump announcement of a inter-agency task force on human trafficking is hardly the level of announcement that typically draws the cameras to the White House, and questions at a Q&A following the officials’ remarks largely veered off onto other topics, including the halted decision to send National Guard troops into Portland and the Israeli Knesset vote to expand control into the West Bank in a move seen by many as a direct challenge to the Trump administration.
The price tag of his planned White House ballroom, which this week began with the demolition of the East Wing, was another subject brought up by reporters.
Yet many of Trump’s responses were more notable for their style than substance as a grinning U.S. president poked at individual reporters as “beauties,” including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, denied questions to others (”not that guy, he’s hopeless!”), and commented favorably about how he preferred questions like ones from Trump-supporting network Real America’s Voice reporter Brian Glenn, who got two separate chances to ask questions, and another conservative reporter who received a compliment on his query before it was even asked.
To CNN’s Collins, he granted two questions as well, but seemingly only to spar with her: “Well, you know nothing about crypto[currency]. You know nothing about-- you know nothing about nothing, you’re fake news.”
One French reporter even caught a stray from the president, who answered her question on the Knesset vote only after it was “translated” by Bondi, telling the reporter: “Beautiful accent. But we can’t understand what you’re saying.”
On the subject of White House renovations, he derisively quipped that the White House had previously used tiles “out of a box” from Home Depot, and vowed that his new construction would result in “the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world”.
While spectacle is a part of any White House, Thursday’s event comes as the president is refusing to meet with congressional Democrats to negotiate an end to a 22-day-long government shutdown, one of the longest in history, and as the administration is coming under increasing pressure from Congress to act on cost of living issues like the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and persistently high food prices.
Trump is also facing resistance from Republicans on the issue of his strikes against suspected “narco-terrorists” in the Gulf of Mexico, an escalating military campaign launched by U.S. forces that has now destroyed more than half a dozen craft the White House and Department of Defense claim were used by drug smugglers. The Trump administration is also reportedly using the threat of military might and other means to induce regime change in Venezuela after he campaigned against such efforts abroad during his 2024 run for the presidency.
As his approval ratings on economic issues and the matter of border security and mass deportations continue to sink lower, such meetings increasingly raise the question of whether the president is being exposed to criticism and objective viewpoints by his closest advisers, who largely seem consumed by an urge to suck up. The answer could be bad news for the rest of his party, which is creeping closer to an election year where Trump himself won’t be the buoy at the top of the ticket as much as an omnipresent cloud over the heads of every vulnerable Republican.
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