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At a cabinet meeting commemorating Trump’s 100th day in office, administration officials indulged in a sickening orgy of sycophancy as they attempted to top each other in preposterous praise of the orange gasbag in chief.
Attorney General Pam Bondi won the day with the ridiculous lie that without Trump’s tighter border restrictions in his first 100 days, 258 million Americans, or 75 percent of the population, would have died of fentanyl overdoses.
"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,” Bondi claimed at another point in a scene that would make Kim Jong Un blush.
Simultaneously, meanwhile, Trump engaged in a sad, desperate reshuffle of top administration roles, incompetently attempting to address his national security staff’s farcical incompetence without actually addressing it or holding anyone accountable, least of all himself.
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The sycophancy and the personnel failures are of course intertwined. Trump surrounds himself with craven toadies and believes the sole function of his advisers and cabinet officials should be to crawl on their bellies before King Trump.
Competent officials need to be willing to tell the president when he’s wrong, but Trump doesn’t want to hear anything other than praise and flattery. That leaves him surrounding himself with fools, grifters, conspiracy theorists, and whatever you call the spineless sack of gelatin that is Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The “you’re fired” guy won’t actually fire anyone
One of the most foolish of those fools was National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, whose foolishness was so great that Trump finally defenestrated him — in the least effectual, most counterproductive manner possible.
Waltz came to the Trump White House with a resume which was not exactly stellar, but was less ridiculous than some; he’s a former Green Beret and served as an adviser for Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates before spending three terms as a congressman from Florida.
However, like all of Trump’s other second term appointees, Waltz’s fitness was mostly based on his ability to gas up Trump and spew conspiratorial bilge. Fittingly, one of his final acts as national security adviser was to slather the president with Pyongyang-style praise during last week’s cabinet meeting.
Waltz flip-flopped on Ukraine to please his orange master, abandoning calls to provide more aid in line with Trump’s pro-Putin stance. During the 2024 campaign, Waltz auditioned for an administration role by showing up at Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial along with other MAGA goons. He’s enthusiastically joined in on Trump’s neo-segregationist assault on DEI policies, insisting that the promotion of women, Black people, and other non-white men in the armed forces undermines a “merit-based culture.”
During his short tenure as national security adviser, Waltz demonstrated that there is at least one national security appointment that is not merit-based: his own. In March, he organized a Signal chat to coordinate a US military strike on Yemen. Signal is a commercial app and can be accessed easily through phone hacking; it should not be used for highly sensitive military operations.
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