Trump Spends Over 5 Minutes on the Cost of Sharpie Pens in Bizarre Cabinet Meeting Riff

President Donald Trump went on an extended, freewheeling tangent about the cost of Sharpie pens during a live, televised Cabinet meeting Thursday morning — a five-plus-minute riff that careened from federal construction overruns, to ballpoint pen aesthetics, to a personal phone call with a Sharpie executive, all while the United States is actively at war with Iran, gas prices are spiking at home, and America’s allies are declining to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

The timing made the digression land differently than it might have otherwise. Trump’s approval ratings have been sliding. The military campaign against Iran, by several measures, is not going as smoothly as the administration has suggested. The economic ripple effects of a disrupted Persian Gulf are being felt at gas stations across the country. And in the middle of all of it, the President of the United States pulled a Sharpie out of his pocket during a Cabinet meeting to make a point about government waste.

The tangent began, ostensibly, as a parable about the Federal Reserve’s headquarters renovation — which Trump claimed had ballooned to over $3 billion, possibly $4 billion. He told the Cabinet he could have done the whole job for $25 million. “And it would be better,” he said, twice. From there, he pivoted to the $1,000 gold-and-silver ballpoint pens he inherited from the Biden administration, at least one of which, he noted with some indignation, contained no ink. He described handing them out to children who had no idea what they were holding, expressed something close to guilt about the extravagance, and then explained that he had personally called the Sharpie company to negotiate a better deal.

“I said, how about $5 a pen,” Trump said with evident pride. “These were $1,000 a pen.”

He also asked the Sharpie rep to paint his pen black so it wouldn’t look too informal when signing what he described as a “trillion dollar airplane contract” for new fighter jets and B-2 bombers.

Trump did briefly call Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell “a moron” for not cutting interest rates — though even that landed almost as a throwaway line, a speed bump in the larger Sharpie monologue.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was eventually handed one of the pens as a reward for his work. “Good luck, Scott,” Trump said, to laughter from the room.

Whether the Cabinet laughed because it was funny, or because that’s what you do, was difficult to determine from the transcript.

Watch above via Fox News.

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