Maggie Haberman Calls Marathon Cabinet Meeting ‘An Endurance Test of Who Could Praise Trump More’
CNN’s Maggie Haberman offered a blunt assessment of Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, where cabinet secretaries tried to outdo one another in their praise of President Donald Trump.
The meeting lasted three hours and 17 minutes, or about the amount of time it takes to fly from San Francisco to Austin. Trump took questions from reporters, but also received all kinds of praise from his department heads and other top officials. At one point, Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy, called Trump “the single finest candidate” for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Hours later on CNN’s The Source, host Kaitlan Collins marveled at the length of the meeting.
“What did you make of the cabinet meeting overall?” she asked Haberman. “And what you heard from around the table?”
Haberman replied:
What I heard was an endurance test of who could praise President Trump more. There were some people who were talking about what their agencies were doing. At one point, [Secretary of Transportation] Sean Duffy talked about a request for proposals for one of the agencies that he’s involved with. You heard [Secretary of the Treasury] Scott Bessent talk some about the economy and the Fed. You heard Secretary [of State] Marco Rubio do some of that.
But generally, what you heard was a competition for who could tell President Trump that he had saved the country more. And they started trying to one up each other. And I think what struck me most was that, I mean, yes, it’s it was a sort of remarkable duration, obviously, but I assume a lot of those people, including the president of the United States, had other things to do other than sit and do this when it was not purely about what the agencies’ work was. The lead point was to praise him.
Trump went on several digressions during the meeting. At one point, he addressed criticisms that he has been acting like an authoritarian in light of his National Guard deployments to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.
“So the line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime,” he said. “So a lot of people say, you know, ‘If that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator. I just had to stop crime.”
Watch above via CNN.
