Trump Held a TV Meeting to Show How Government Works and Now I’m an Anarchist

“The Apprentice” is now the second-dumbest Trump TV show

Built from a photo by Mandel Ngan via Getty.

***Hey! I plan to do Komedy Klass next week, so please send your incisive social commentary/dumb bullshit to komedyklass@imightbewrong.org. One piece will be picked to serve as the jumping-off point for a discussion, and the others will provide jokes for me to steal.

(Not really. Except maybe subconsciously.)

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In 1921, two men in Kansas set out to start a burger chain, but they faced a problem: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle had convinced Americans that “ground beef” was actually rat feces with a touch of cat meat mixed in. To counter this perception, the two men designed a totally transparent restaurant: The kitchen was opened so that customers could see the burgers being made. Corrosion-resistant stainless steel fixtures were installed and employees wore all-white uniforms that they were told to keep spotless at all times. Even the name invoked purity and cleanliness: “White Castle”. And to this day, any Midwesterner will tell you that there is no better place to inhale 20 sliders while drunk after a Cubs game.

On Tuesday, Trump held a more-than-three-hour-long cabinet meeting to show how the sausage of government is made, so to speak. To tie that in to White Castle: Imagine if instead of showing customers that their restaurant was safe and clean, White Castle’s transparent approach revealed that their process made an orgy in a gas station bathroom look like a model of cleanliness. Imagine shit-covered employees shoving snakes into meat grinders, a toddler with a peg leg fighting rats with a bowie knife, and Typhoid Mary herself having diarrhea into the deep fryer. That is basically what Trump just did; he gave us a glimpse into his process, and I am terrified.

Many people noticed that the meeting is the sort of thing a dictator would do. Vladimir Putin loves long, televised meetings, and so does Kim Jong Un — it’s the type of crap you’d expect in a country where people don’t have college football and Celebrity Wheel of Fortune to watch. Trump’s cronies kissed his ass so much that they probably all caught sepsis, and — in keeping with Trump administration custom — the whole thing was possibly illegal.¹ It was an off-putting display, and still more evidence that if Trump isn’t a dictator, he’s cosplaying as a dictator, and I’d say that he’s doing it convincingly.

But I’ve known for a decade that Trump is an aspiring authoritarian; what shocked me was how little his cabinet understands what they’re doing. And I don’t mean “they don’t know what they’re doing” like “they’re making bad decisions” — I mean “they don’t even know what government is.” They’re not piloting the plane poorly; they don’t know that they’re in an airplane. I’ve been writing for years about how Trump and his minions are exploring new horizons of the word “ignorant”, but even I was shocked by how little they knew.

Take Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik…PLEASE! Lutnik made a point that sounds reasonable until you think about it for three seconds:

The “why shouldn’t we get a cut?” question has a very good answer: Because you’re the government, not a company. The whole point of grants is that you want the recipient to get the money; you’re trying to sweeten the pot so that they do something you want them to do. In this case, we’re talking about life-saving medical research, so the government trying to skim off some of the upside means that the government is disincentivizing life-saving research. They’re incentivising with one hand and disincentivizing with the other, so the impact might be neutral or even negative, especially because the university has to have the government as a business partner, which brings to mind the “fuck you, pay me” montage from Goodfellas.

There are times when it makes sense for the government to invest in medical research, but Lutnik’s approach is all wrong. Private investment in medicine typically goes to profitable treatments — i.e. allergy medicines and boner pills — but less-profitable treatments with large societal benefits get ignored. That’s why the government might choose to fund research that could cure a terrible disease but isn’t likely to make a lot of money. But because Lutnik wants to “get something back”, the government is just acting like a private investor, and — for reasons that have been demonstrated many times in many places — they’ll probably be a bad one. Lutnik doesn’t understand that he’s not in the private sector anymore, and the concept of “societal benefit” is clearly not one of the six thoughts rattling around in Trump’s brain.

Moving on: This passage about windmills inspired the opposite of confidence.

Trump doesn’t understand that he doesn’t run a private energy company; he runs the government. A private company needs to choose which type of energy is most viable, but government mostly just needs to get out of the way. The government might try to expand capacity — that’s what the Inflation Reduction Act did — but Trump is restricting capacity; he’s gone so far as to halt construction at wind projects that are nearly finished. He’s wrong about wind causing higher energy prices in the UK; prices are up in the UK mostly because natural gas prices spiked since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Britain’s wind capacity actually makes them less reliant on gas. This is simple: Supply goes up, price goes down, Trump is constricting supply, and that’s probably part of the reason why electricity prices are up 5.5% since Trump took office. A president who wants to lower energy prices would encourage all forms of energy including wind, but unfortunately, “windmills bad” is one of the six thoughts rattling around in Trump’s brain.

Finally, there was this comment from Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, which should probably be on Pornhub under “humiliation”:

I also wish that Witkoff had a “cam recorder” with him to record these amazing testimonials, partly because I’m bothered that our special envoy is apparently walking around with a 2009 Motorola Razr. All phones are cam recorders now, Steve! Also, Hostage Square is in Tel Aviv, and I would very much put Israel/Hamas on the list of conflicts that are not “put to bed”.

Of course, the claim that Trump has ended seven wars is bullshit. When the New York Times asked the White House for a list of the seven conflicts, they provided six — which some would argue is fewer than seven — and Trump really didn’t “solve” any of those conflicts. What happened is that Trump invited world leaders to the White House, had them sign vague agreements, and then declared the conflict “solved”. But nothing has really been solved, the issues that caused the conflicts remain, and in several cases fighting has already resumed.

Once again, Trump doesn’t know what his role is or what the world around him looks like. A “deal” in international relations isn’t like an American business deal, because no authority exists to enforce it — the only “authority” is the U.N., which isn’t an international peacekeeping body so much as an office complex/cafeteria that hates Israel. The “deals” that have been signed are shallow agreements that will exist until they don’t. Trump is clearly desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize, which puts America at a disadvantage, because it’s not exactly The Art Of The Deal to walk into a negotiation and yell “I’M DESPERATE FOR AN AGREEMENT AT ANY COST!”

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If you want to be charitable, the Trump administration thinks that they’re running a company. If you don’t want to be charitable, they think that they’re running an extortion racket. Either way, they don’t understand what government does or why, and their guiding philosophy is “we should get a cut.” They’re striking deeply stupid “deals” with universities, companies, and countries that run counter to the American people’s interest, and then bragging about those deals because they’re too dumb to even understand what they did. This strange-as-hell meeting gave us a glimpse into how the sausage is made, and now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go throw up forever.

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1. For those who didn’t follow the link: The Hatch Act prohibits executive branch employees other than the president and vice president from engaging in certain forms of political activity. It was passed in the ‘30s when people felt that FDR’s cabinet members were stumping for his agenda — it’s a Republican thing. And because Trump’s televised meeting was arguably an advertisement for the Trump administration (I would argue that), it may have violated the Hatch Act.

I would place the odds of Trump facing consequences for possible violations of the Hatch Act at something less than zero.