The Cabinet Is Kissing Trump’s Ass to an Insane Degree. It Signals Something Dangerous.

Tous les 'Toobz were buzzing on Wednesday about the three-hour Cabinet meeting on Tuesday at which, after a while, you half-expected Lemuel Gulliver to crash in through a window, fresh off a negotiation with the Houyhnhnms, the race of intelligent, rational horses who ruled over the Yahoos, a race of barbaric humanoids who smelled worse than the horses. If he had crashed the meeting, ol' Lemuel would have concluded that, in this strange place, the Yahoos would have taken over. Blog kudos to Katie Rogers of The New York Times for capturing the sheer, mad essence of the gathering there in the Gilded Palace of Sin (Thanks again, Gram).

There in the Cabinet Room—which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office—all of the president's men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances. That list is as ever-growing as it is specific to Mr. Trump’s pet peeves and political ambitions. It includes preventing “transgender for everybody” in American sports; using a heavy hand—perhaps the death penalty, the president said — to crack down on violent crime; the ongoing threat of windmills; the foul state of traffic medians; the speed with which water flows; and the attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to grow by the day.

The cabinet event was billed as a celebration of American workers ahead of Labor Day. Yet with a running time of three hours and 15 minutes, it would be considered a wildly inefficient meeting at just about any other workplace. The actual policy menu was just gristle in comparison to the red-meat politics, but for an afternoon, the Trump White House really was as radically transparent as Mr. Trump likes to say it is. “There’s something really nice about just, you know, the openness of what we’re doing,” Mr. Trump mused as he closed the gathering out. “It’s government.”

Actually, no. It was a gang licking of the spittle. There was more ass-kissing in those three hours than in the entire oeuvre of the Mitchell Brothers. For example, Rogers picked up on a wonderful exchange between El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his Secretary of Health and Human Services. And by "wonderful," I mean "luminescently batshit."

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.

But even Kennedy's effort fell short compared to that of Steve Witkoff, the president's billionaire minister without portfolio—or, as near as can be told, purpose. Gaze upon his smooching and despair.

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 twenty, 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.

Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog points us to this interesting essay from Xavier Marquez, a political scientist from New Zealand who has studied what he calls "flattery inflation in authoritarian regimes." Marquez writes:

Consider just a few examples from several very different modern political regimes. In the 1980s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauescu was routinely called “the Giant of the Carpathians”, “the Source of Our Light”, “the Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma”, “the Great Architect”, “the Celestial Body”, and “the New Morning Star” by major public figures, and “court poets” wrote embarrassing encomiums to his rule (Sebestyen 2010, p. 161). In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu Sese Seko was hailed as a new “Prophet” and “Messiah”, and his Interior Minister at the time even proposed replacing crucifixes in schools with Mobutu’s image (Young and Turner 1985, p. 169). Beginning in the late 1930s, Francisco Franco’s sycophants compared him to Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, El Cid, Charles V, and most of the kings of the “Golden Age” of Spain; routinely praised him as a “military genius” and said to be “providentially ordained” as savior of Spain, a veritable “messiah of civic redemption;” called him “the Sun” and the “Father of Peace;” and exalted his intelligence, political acuteness, work habits, physical stamina, literary acumen, and even his sense of humor and his skills as a hunter, fisherman, and golf player (Fernández 1983, pp. 311-324). And in Syria in the 1990s, president Hafiz al-Assad was praised as the country’s “premier pharmacist,” as well as the country’s premier teacher, doctor, and lawyer, among other things.

Alas, Marquez fails to mention the various leaders of Turkmenistan, including the one who renamed some of the months of the year for himself and his extended family. He got January, and he renamed April after his mother.

Marquez argues that the problem with flattery inflation is that it doesn't stay inside places like the Cabinet room.

In many cases, such flattery does not remain confined to elite figures in the media or in the ruler’s immediate court, but gives rise to widespread ritual practices of ruler worship, genuine “cults” of the leader that demand the participation of many different social groups to recognize the leader’s exalted status. The cults of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, the Kim family in North Korea, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany are the most well-known of these,5 but such phenomena can be found elsewhere as well, including in comparatively open political contexts like the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. These forms of flattery seem sometimes humorous or bizarre. Yet they are puzzling, disproportionate to the achievements or charisma of their object: who could possibly believe that Hafiz al-Assad was indeed Syria’s premier pharmacist, and what could possibly be the point of publicizing this ridiculous claim?

Every purported elite news operation who covered this farce live should go dark until they've answered that question.