We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Here is a partial list of subjects covered by the President of the United States at Thursday’s cabinet meeting:

The obliteration of Iran’s navy. The TSA shutdown. A woman killed in Chicago. The Federal Reserve building renovation. The cost of Sharpie pens. Venezuelan oil revenue. King Charles’s cancer. Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability. Cognitive tests. SCOTUS. The Kennedy Center. California high-speed rail. NATO’s failure to send ships. A thousand-dollar pen that didn’t write. The prime minister of the United Kingdom. Caravans. Sanctuary cities.  The 25th Amendment. A joint venture with Venezuela. Drug smugglers who don’t watch television.

That was one meeting. Ninety-eight minutes. A wartime cabinet briefing.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: if a transcript from this meeting came from the government of Brazil — or Hungary, or any country we cover from a comfortable critical distance — we would not file it as a cabinet meeting. We would write about it as a document. We would ask what it reveals about the man producing it and the institution that has formed around him. We would use different words.

But we don’t use different words for Trump. We stopped a long time ago, so gradually that I’m not sure anyone made a conscious decision to stop. It just became the way the job gets done.

And I say “we” deliberately, because Mediaite runs the clips too. We package the highlights. We write the posts. I’ve written more of them than I care to admit, and I’ll probably write more, as the traffic they generate is part of what keeps the lights on here. So I’m not throwing stones from outside the house. I live in this house. That’s actually why it bothers me.

Let me be precise about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying Trump is incoherent — that’s the lazy diagnosis and it’s wrong. He is, in many ways, a brilliant talker.

The relentless repetition, the superlatives, the constant gravitational pull back toward winning — that’s not rambling, that’s a rhetorical discipline he absorbed from Norman Vincent Peale as a young man and has never stopped practicing. He can hold a room for two hours and never lose the thread because the thread, for him, is always the same thread: him versus everyone else, competence versus incompetence, builders versus bureaucrats. The Sharpie story and the Iran story are, in his telling, the same story. That’s not nothing.

But there’s a significant distance between “not incoherent” and “normal,” and we have somehow allowed that distance to collapse.

Compare Thursday to how the press covered Joe Biden’s decline — and I mean that as an observation, not a complaint, because that coverage was legitimate. Biden’s visible deterioration became a persistent, serious, ultimately determinative story. Reporters documented it carefully. Editors treated it as a genuine question about presidential capacity. The press built a vocabulary for that kind of breakdown and applied it with consistency.

That same press watched Trump move from Iranian casualty counts to Sharpie unit economics to Venezuelan oil revenue to King Charles’s cancer to Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability — in a single unbroken monologue, at a wartime cabinet meeting, in front of cameras — and filed it under: here’s what the president said today.

We have a vocabulary for one kind of presidential communication failure. We have decided, apparently, not to develop one for this kind. And that asymmetry is a choice, even when it doesn’t feel like one.

The easy defense is that Trump’s style, however unusual, is functional — that he tracks policy, knows his players, understands leverage. That’s true. But it’s also beside the point. The question isn’t whether he’s capable. The question is whether we are actually describing what we’re watching, or whether we’ve quietly shifted into translation mode — taking what happens in that room and rendering it into something that fits the templates we already have, because that’s easier and faster and the templates are what the traffic wants.

I think we’re translating. I think we’ve been translating for a while now. And the thing about translation is that something always gets lost — usually the part that would require us to stop and say, out loud, in a published sentence: this is not what this has ever looked like before, and we should probably name that.

Read the transcript. I mean actually read it, the whole thing, not the clips. Read it the way you’d read a document from a foreign government you were trying to understand. Ask yourself what you would write if you didn’t already have a template for it.

Then ask yourself why we don’t write that.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!