President Donald Trump's Cabinet meetings have become somewhat infamous for the various secretaries sucking up to him in any way they can think of, but now, an exhaustive analysis of video footage by the New York Times has confirmed the biggest kiss-up of the group.
In a new report this week, the Times broke down trends apparent across all of Trump's second-term Cabinet meetings. Based on roughly 12 hours of examined footage, the outlet explained, flattery and exaggeration were the name of the game.
“On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents,” the report detailed. “Many of these statements are exaggerated or not factually accurate.”
Amid that overall trend, one name rose to the top as the most eager to please the president: Secretary of State Marco Rubio. According to the report's findings, Rubio "flattered the president the most" out of the entire Cabinet, though this may be more to do with the fact that he also spoke the most across all of the meetings.
“There’s only one leader in the world that’s capable of bringing the two sides to a table, and that’s our president, the president of the United States, President Trump,” Rubio said in one meeting, as highlighted by the Times' report. “The only chance we have for peace is through the president’s leadership.”
Rubio at one point also called Trump the "only leader in the world that can help end" the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Sudanese civil war. Trailing Rubio in the Times' ranking were Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who once hailed Trump as having, "saved this country by making it the best place in the world to do business again," and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that "no other president would have been willing to empower those warriors that way to be that effective," in the wake of the Venezuela operation earlier this year.
As the Daily Beast noted about the situation in its own report, "The fact that Rubio has emerged as one of the most successful members of Trump’s Cabinet may not be a coincidence."
"Rubio has now presided over a sweeping reorganization of foreign policy and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, while helping steer Trump’s lightning invasion of Venezuela and war with Iran," the Daily Beast explained. "He’s also become the only official since Henry Kissinger to hold the post of secretary of state and national security adviser. Trump has even joked he might make Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage, the president of Cuba if his administration topples the communist island nation’s regime."
It added: "That success has buoyed Rubio in the polls. A survey released earlier this month put him at 45.4 percent among Republican voters for the 2028 nomination—comfortably ahead of the previous favorite, Vice President JD Vance at just 29.6 percent, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 11.2 percent."
