‘Taking the gloves off’: Trump just held the Cabinet meeting from Hell

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Holly Baxter reports on a wild-eyed, fast-talking Pete Hegseth and Trump’s detour from ‘fat drugs for fat people’ to extrajudicial killings to Melania’s thoughts on the construction noise around the new ballroom at the White House

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You can laugh, or you can cry. But what you definitely cannot do — without a stiff dose of irony — is treat this as normal. Because the current Donald Trump feat. Pete Hegseth Show (working title: “Were They War Crimes? And Other Questions We Don’t Care to Answer”) is already stranger than satire.

The other day, we learned that the United States military fired first on a suspected narcotics boat off the coast of Trinidad — and then, when two people managed to cling to the wreckage, fired again. The follow-up strike, according to reporting in The Washington Post, was ordered by an admiral following Hegseth’s instruction to “kill everybody.”

That’s a quote the White House denies — although Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly said during a press conference that the second strike was intended to kill everybody on board the ships, and that the U.S. has the authority to do so because of a bizarre interpretation of national self-defense.

Double-tap strikes are highly controversial and seen by many as war crimes. Under the most basic tenets of the laws of war — which the US helped to write — you don’t mow down survivors of a bombing, especially survivors who are not enemy combatants. You rescue them, you detain them, or you turn them over to law enforcement. And if something like that does happen, you investigate the people who made the call.

Or — or! There is another alternative. If you’re War Daddy Pete Hegseth, you take to social media and post a doctored cover of Franklin the Turtle — yes, the picture-book turtle who teaches kids manners and friendship — reimagined brandishing a bazooka, targeting “narco-terrorists.” And you write in the caption: “For your Christmas wish list.”

The publisher of that series responded with shock and disgust: Franklin was never meant to promote bloodshed.

But who even cares whether it was Pete Hegseth or a different admiral or an anthropomorphic turtle who fired on the boats and then blasted the survivors into pieces? The story itself is unclear: First, it seemed like Hegseth himself had made the call. Then the Pentagon distanced itself from what happened entirely. Then the White House doubled down on it all, calling the two strikes legal as claims of extrajudicial killings gathered momentum. And then, at today’s Cabinet meeting, the reason why nothing would be publicly divulged or investigated had morphed again.

In it, Hegseth, speaking bizarrely fast, delivered a rapid-fire list of sycophancy about Trump (Ukraine is a war that “never would have started under President Trump,” Biden was the worst president ever, “DEI and political correctness” has been “ripped out” under Trump’s orders, and so on, and so on), before pivoting to “the narco-terrorists.”

“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” he said, at a hundred miles per hour, eyes alighting on every corner of the room. He’s “taking the gloves off.” The strikes are such successful deterrents already that “it’s hard to find boats to strike right now.” And “just like President Trump always has our backs,” he “always has the backs” of people in the military who might make decisions that may or may not be referred to as war crimes. But to be clear, he’s not going to take the rap himself.

In other words, loyalty will make everything OK. Eyewitness testimony or international law is secondary to whether they “believe” each other. And the next guy who comes along will keep believing you, so long as you monologue about his achievements on camera at every opportunity — so my God, you better do it.

This was a particularly awkward Cabinet meeting, which opened with almost an hour of Trump meandering about the new ballroom in the White House and whether Melania gets bothered by the construction noise; the “rigged election” of 2020; Joe Biden; the idea that the word “affordability” doesn’t have a definition; Joe Biden; a “very low-IQ congresswoman” he doesn’t like; his physical health, which is apparently impeccable because he “got A’s on everything” during his annual physical; Joe Biden; how he made Ozempic cheaper, or, as he put it, “the fat drug, F-A-T, for fat people”; how he didn’t get the Nobel Prize even though he deserved it more than anybody else in the world; how people “love to correct me even though I’m right about everything”; Joe Biden; how the environmentally friendly Green New Deal was a “scam” because “they talked about global warming and all that crap”; why the green tiles that, yes, Joe Biden chose for a bathroom in the White House weren’t very nice; why the New York Times is a bunch of losers; and, to round it all off, another description of the new ballroom.

They then, in Trump’s words, went “round the room quickly” to give each Cabinet member a two-minute slot in which to detail their “achievements” to the cameras.

There are moments in American politics when the curtain lifts and what’s shown behind is the country’s raw, unfiltered id staring straight into the camera. This meeting was one of those moments: a 55-minute stream-of-consciousness performance from a president who began and ended with décor critiques and featured a pep rally for ocean-based vigilantism in the middle. And of course, it was punctuated with a lot of painful, forced laughter from the people around the table.

There’s a temptation to laugh at all this — the A-graded physical, the spelled-out fat drug, the ballroom built atop of grievance. And humor is necessary; if anything, it’s the pressure valve that keeps the country from simply keeling over.

But there’s also danger in laughing too easily. Because underneath the rambling showmanship was a simple pattern: enemies everywhere. The media, Democrats, global warming, congresswomen, immigrants, China, “narco-terrorists,” the literal definition of words — all presented as threats requiring not governance but retribution. Yes, in the words of Mark Kelly, Pete Hegseth is “not a serious person.” But he’s certainly holding a serious job.

The MAGA worldview is now one in which the president is the only protagonist, the only source of truth, the only man with straight A’s, a worldview in which reality bends not to evidence but to assertion. And Hegseth’s frenetic monologue showed where that worldview leads: into the ocean, where people are blasted apart because of a war that exists in someone else’s head, and where the moral framework is “taking the gloves off.”

America is being told a story — not a Franklin the Turtle story, but a much more narratively dishonest one — where the president is simultaneously the victim and the hero, the builder of ballrooms and the man who will somehow abolish income tax, a charming uncle and a terrifying specter who demands loyalty at all costs. Here, grievances are policy and insults are ideology.

And the people in the room just laugh and laugh and laugh, because the alternative is unthinkable.

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