By Kennedy Maize
On August 26, President Trump assembled his administration’s leaders: cabinet secretaries, executive branch agency heads, and the like at the White House. It was billed as a “cabinet meeting,” implying a serious give-and-take among the top brass, focused on thorny issues.
It was none of that. It was a cabinet meeting in name only. Rather, it was a worship service, lasting an interminable 3 hours and 16 minutes, most of it dominated by Trump himself. After a long opening sermon of self-praise, Trump turned it over to his parishioners to burnish his magnificence.
Energy occupied much of Trump’s initial attention, taking up close to a quarter of his initial soliloquy. Almost everything he said about energy was wrong, much prevarication, most laughable. There were no laughs from his congregation.
Oil prices, he said, are “down close to $60 a barrel, and you’ll be breaking that pretty soon and that has a huge impact,” one of his few accurate statements about energy and not something the oil industry is happy about.
On gasoline prices, Trump trumpeted, “now it’s probably $2.25. There are some places it’s $2. It broke $2 at a couple of locations in the South.” Name them, please? Later he riffed a bit more on petrol prices, claiming hilariously that in the Biden administration “they were up to $7, $7.5.”
He also bragged about what he’s done for coal, emulating China, as well as offering praise for nukes. “And coal is back with this country too, by the way,” he said. “There’s a reason they use it because it’s good. It works for them. And we call it clean coal. We don’t call it coal. We call it clean, even very clean coal. But we have coal going up. We have nuclear going up. Nuclear is very much in vogue now. It’s safe and inexpensive and great.”
Next came the demons and devils. The deity railed against wind and solar – and particularly wind—for a full three minutes.
“We don’t allow windmills,” Trump claimed, not completely accurately. “We’re not allowing any windmills to go up. Unless there’s a legal situation where somebody committed to it a long time ago, we don’t allow windmills. And we don’t want the solar panels that I was speaking with the secretary about because they take up thousands of acres of our farmland. You see these big ugly patches of black plastic that comes from China. And I like solar in some ways, but for firing up your big plants, it doesn’t work. It’s very unstable, but it really takes up your farm. The farmers are saying they’re building these massive blotches in the middle of the fields all over the country. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy.”
That wasn’t enough. “So we’re not heavy into that at all. And windmills, we’re just not going to allow them. They’re ruining our country. They’re ruining everyone. I hate to mention countries, but you look at the UK, what’s happened at UK, energy costs have gone through the roof. It’s because of wind. They want to do everything. Close up the northern parts of the country, they have oil. It’s tremendous. And they close it up. I tell them, ‘You’re my friends, but man, you’re going to have a bad awakening very soon. It’s going to be very bad.’”
Finally. “They’re ugly, they don’t work. They kill your birds. They’re bad for the environment. And if you look at them from a house, your house is worth less than 50%. So I’m trying to have people learn about wind real fast and I think I’ve done a good job, but not good enough because some countries are still trying and they’re destroying themselves. Those are countries that are really destroying themselves. I hope they get back to fossil fuel because right now, Chris [a reference to Energy Secretary Chris “Worthless” Wright], whether we like it or not, fossil fuel is the thing that works. And then you can add nuclear with it and other things, but fossil fuel is what works if we’re going to fire up those big monster factories.”
Trump then turned the meeting over to his acolytes, who dutifully followed with mandatory praise. At only one point did a novitiate deviate from the catechism. Trump’s body language showed his irritation when Junior Kennedy, his unhealthy secretary, went on his own anti-wind riff, based on his time as an environmental attorney. It was clear Kennedy’s wind knowledge surpassed Trump’s and Kennedy had been at it before Trump saw his first “windmill.”
Among the many cringeworthy comments from Trumps cabinet, Attorney General Pam Bondi won the prize: “President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of ANY other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also made the cringeworthy cavalcade: “Everybody I’ve met, whether it’s at a coal mine or the border, law enforcement, the one thing they say is please thank President Trump from all of us — the change that you’re making.”
Trump’s unconventional demand for praise drew predictable reviews from diverse political views. Legitimate conservative commentator Ann Coulter posted on Twitter, “Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il-style tributes?”
Well before the meeting, liberal commentator, barbeque connoisseur, and self-described deadline poet Calvin Trillin wrote in The Nation in June:
“A Trumpworld figure isn’t judged
On how he carries out some duty.
It’s more about the kisses he
Can plant on Donald Trump’s patootie.”
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