Trump's unhinged cabinet gathering laid bare both his cognitive decline and contempt
16h
U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he holds a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
On Tuesday, the President of the United States chaired a meeting of his busted cabinet that would have been impossible to believe just 10 years ago. I had no intention of watching this North Korea-like, state-run propaganda, but once I’d bumped into it, I found I couldn't take my eyes off it.
It was a train wreck wrapped in a dumpster fire, and in a normal time and place would have ended this appalling presidency.
Who could watch even five minutes of that tragedy without knowing that it simply had to be cancelled? Who could watch a man who is so obviously rotting from the inside out, and not flag the absurdity and danger of it all?
Those questions are chiefly for you, corporate media. But more on you in a moment …
Whatever was happening inside that room was not normal, and it certainly isn’t working.
The 142-year-old 79-year-old Donald Trump was adorned in a pink tie and stuffed in a white shirt and dark jacket that clashed badly with his burnt-orange face and the straw-colored wig puffed over his wrinkled head just so. When does he decide that this is the preposterous costume he wants to wear on a given day?
“Less combover, more fluff … A little less brown, and more white around the eyes … More orange in the cheeks, less around the chin … Hand me that pink tie …”
He looks absolutely ridiculous.
In the meeting, he did everything he could to stay awake, his head bobbing up and down and side to side. He pawed at his orange face as he drifted off to the fairways of Mar-a-Lago. It was hard to tell if he'd skipped one of the drug cocktails he pounds throughout the day, or just had one too many in anticipation of his big meeting with his crooked staff.
While he fought sleep, his grotesque collection of anti-vaxxers, stone-cold bigots, crooks, and multi-millionaires and billionaires showered him with praise for the stellar job he is doing heaping all his hate on the world, while stuffing his bottomless pockets with millions and millions in kickbacks and blood money.
One of them, the racist, puppy-shooting Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, preposterously thanked him for keeping the hurricanes away from the United States this year.
This kind of absurd praise would normally get an affirmative rise from Sleepy Rider.
Not this time.
No, this time Trump was barely alive, almost unresponsive to the sort of firehose of putrid adulation that used to inject him with life.
I’m really not sure whether to laugh or cry at this theater of the completely absurd — but I’m pretty sure indifference can’t be a viable option.
A drunk is at the wheel and for some horrible reason nobody is taking away his keys.
On Tuesday, after the praise finally stopped, the media was semi-free to ask this wreck of a man and his gathered assemblage of dangerous clowns questions about the abomination they just witnessed.
Except not one of these so-called journalists asked the most obvious question:
“Do you demand that these people ridiculously fawn over you like some tin-pot dictator, and shower you with this disgusting praise, or do they actually lower themselves into your trash can, and just stink up the entire place on their own?”
Instead, the assembled press ignored the fire that was burning out of control inside that room, and addressed a few of the myriad blazes that have been gleefully started by these arsonists outside the room.
Then, Trump finally rose to the bizarre occasion — triggered by a press he has spent a lifetime both needing and hating.
Scratching the sleep from his puffy eyes, he sat up in full harrumph. You could almost see the hate pouring from his chapped, pursed lips. Even his chubby, little hands were doing that weird accordion thing, as he holds everything and everybody in contempt.
He woke up in a bad mood.
He attacked Somalis, saying, “I don’t want them in our country.”
He doubled down: “We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
He tripled down, calling Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “garbage.”
In full attack mode, the bile rising up out of him, he relieved his pain by inflicting it on anything or anybody that came across his short-circuiting mind:
“Countries were ripping us off for years, including allies. I won’t use the names. I won’t mention Japan. I will refuse to mention South Korea. I will not mention names.”
Of course, even when he is seeing red, and raging like a complete maniac, he never mentions names like Russia and Saudi Arabia in this context.
Such control …
Look, it’s sickening when he gets like this, but sicker yet that nobody points it out. He’s crashing, and intent on making sure everybody else goes up in smoke.
We can’t go on like this.
Finally, Trump addressed his obviously failing health, and never-ending “perfect” visits to the doctor, as only he can:
“I took my physical. I got all As. Everything. But they [the doctors] said to me, ‘Would you like to take a cognitive test?’ So I said, ‘Is it hard?’ And they said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’m a very smart person. Who was the last president to take one?’ So they said, ‘No president has ever agreed to take one’ ... I aced it.”
Nobody said a word.
The demented voices inside the man’s fat, orange head were doing all the talking …
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.