It could have been a group of Hollywood scriptwriters devising a MAGA version of The West Wing.
No matter what was happening in the world outside, all the leading characters in President Donald Trump‘s Cabinet sat around the table and took it in turns to present their alternative realities.
Trump was the hero. Everything he touched turned to gold.
ADVERTISEMENT
Joe Biden was the villain. Anything he touched was wrong.
And everybody stuck to the script.
The cold open to the 100-days show had already been cut. Nobody likes to start on a downer and a shrinking economy was an embarrassing contradiction to the “historic” achievements of the new administration.
“You probably saw some numbers today,” said Trump as a precursor to the celebration of his greatness, “and I have to start off by saying that’s Biden. That’s not Trump, because we came in on January 20… and I was very against everything that Biden is doing in terms of the economy, destroying our country in so many ways, not only at the border, the border was more obvious, but we took over his mess in so many different ways.”
Just in case anyone was in doubt, any bad news should be shoveled towards the previous president.
This was very definitely a feel good production. Words like “epic” and “honor” were bandied around as, one by one, Trump’s knights of the oval table paid fealty to their king. The saccharin speeches made your teeth ache watching them.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was first. Trump’s “least controversial” courtier, according to the president himself. He tried to sound grown-up telling his colleagues that Biden messed up Afghanistan and all he worried about was climate change and DEI and didn’t care anything about “lethality and war fighting.”
Now every able bodied American was desperate to join the U.S. military (as long as they are “fit not fat”) and they “don’t want to get out.” Hegseth’s general gist was that recruitment under General Trump was better than it had been in decades. His colleagues knew already. He told them in a group chat.
Hegseth was sitting to Trump’s left, presumably as a message from the commander-in-chief that he still had faith in his scandal-prone Pentagon chief. Or to elbow him in the ribs if he said something stupid.
RFK Jr. was chewing some kind of gum. Perhaps he’d seen someone do it in a movie when they want to be taken seriously. He certainly didn’t do an Adrian Brody and throw it out to Tulsi Gabbard before taking his turn to talk.
He started out by thanking Trump for his “extraordinary leadership.” Of course, the Health and Human Services Secretary was given dietary guidelines by the Biden administration that were “unreadable” and from the same kind of “politicized science that drove fruit loops to the top of the food chain.” But all’s well now. Under Trump he’s Making America Healthy Again. And hunting sex traffickers.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon was wrestling with the dilemma of cutting the Department of Education to shreds and promising better test scores, but she was pulling it off. At least she said she was. She admitted to the president that she was failing at her biggest role. “I don’t think I have ever worked so hard to fire myself,” she said, adding hopefully: “We’re certainly making great strides in that.”
Elon Musk was halfway out the door so he kept his comments brief. He was wearing two caps and was clearly trying to cut down on hats to focus on his cars. But he still tipped them on his way out to suggest that Trump was running the “greatest administration”, perhaps ever. Certainly better than Biden.
JD Vance was getting so worked up over Biden that his voice rose a couple of octaves. Either that or his khakis were too tight. He was especially unhappy the “fake news” was saying that Biden deported more people. How dare they say such a thing. Trump deserved all the credit, he insisted. For everything, actually.
“Why is it that the press is so focused on the fake B.S., rather than what’s really going on in the country?” Er, maybe because they don’t just watch Fox & Friends…
Just to press home his point, Vance compared Trump incredibly favorably with America’s past presidents. “You sit in the Oval Office and you see these portraits of presidents past. And let’s be honest, most of them have been placeholders,” he said. “They’ve been people who’ve allowed their staff to sign executive orders with an autopen instead of men of action,” he added. Seriously. The implication was that Trump was a man of action. With a pen.
Deliriously happy about “signing death warrants” to keep America safe, Attorney General Pam Bondi was also quick to praise her leader. “Mr. President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country,” she said. “Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you.”
Scott Bessent went with “momentous” to describe Trump’s latest tenure. The treasury secretary usually gets canned when the economy lurches into reverse and a money man like Bessent would be all too aware of the need for positive results. But, then again, it’s Biden’s fault and not his. So, no need to worry. At least for now.
Similarly Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief-of-staff, could be getting some flak for the polls taking a dive across the board, from the economy to immigration, the one area where the administration has been making some strides, even if not everyone (including the judiciary) appears to agree.
“Congratulations to everyone on 100 days... It’s unparalleled in my memory, and best I can tell ever,” said the most powerful woman in the world and inveterate Kool Aid drinker.
Another recent Kool Aid quaffer, Marco Rubio, sitting to the president’s right, just far away enough not to let the president see him sweat, insisted Trump held more sway than anybody in America, including a judge. “Because the conduct of all foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States and the executive branch, not some judge.”
The Cabinet members left it for those outside (Peter Navarro anybody) to try and explain how a shrinking economy they were blaming on Biden was not altogether a bad thing and could be seen as a positive sign for America once the whole tariff mess had sorted itself out.
Certainly nobody mentioned Trump’s Truth Social post from a year ago.
It was Jan. 2024 and the U.S. economy under President Joe Biden was booming. Robust consumer spending and a strong jobs market was driving economic growth, which grew at a healthy 2.8 percent to build on the 2.9 percent growth the previous year.
The Fed had cut interest rates by half a percent and inflation had slowed to 2.5 percent, the lowest level in more than three years.
But according to Trump, this economic bonanza had little to do with the man in the Oval Office.
“THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP — EVERYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE,” he wrote on his Truth Social account on January 29, 2024.
Fast forward by one year and 100 days and the economy is in the toilet. Rather than the 0.4 percent growth predicted by economists after a strong end to 2024, the U.S. economy shrunk by 0.3 percent—the first quarter of negative growth since the beginning of 2022 as America was climbing out of a financially crippling pandemic.
But this wasn’t Trump’s economy. It was Biden’s.
“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “I didn’t take over until January 20th,” he continued. “Tariffs will soon start kicking in, and companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our Country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden “Overhang.” This will take a while, has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”
This is the new topsy-turvy reality in Trump’s White House. We are supposed to ignore what we see and hear and believe Trump when he says everything he has done is wonderful.
And everything Biden did was bad.
In the original (left-leaning) version of The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlett had a habit of coming up with the right quote for the right time.
“I’m the President of the United States, not the president of the people who agree with me,” he famously said after averting another TV crisis.
Well that may have been true 20 years ago.
Not any more.
