Written by Lila Özler
On August 26, 2025—a seemingly arbitrary Tuesday would soon carve its place in history—the greatest piece of cinema was televised. Longer than Avatar by a cheeky five minutes, it was the longest Trump Cabinet meeting yet. Clocking in at three hours and seventeen minutes, the meeting put Trump, a narcissist with a soft spot for puffery and some real talent for foolish babble, head-to-head with Putin’s record-breaking press conference of four hours and forty minutes. One wonders if Trump were ever to break that record, would the “fantastic relationship” he so incessantly gushes about to the media survive the dethroning? Or would their bromance buckle under the weight of stopwatch envy, as it tends to do every two weeks or so?
As is often the case, the variety show was merely a catalogue of lavish thanks to Trump from his cast members and partisans, all with an itch for a sliver of eye contact and a pat on the head, throwing out almost any praise to get it. Barely thirty minutes in, Iris Tao, a reporter for The Epoch Times, recounted how she had been mugged in Washington and laid bare her gratitude to the President for sending in federal troops to fight crime in the city: “Thank you for now making D.C. safer. For us, for our families, for my parents, on behalf of my parents, and now my baby on the way. Thank you so much.”
Amid the spectacle of sycophancy—and Trump’s usual shibboleths about the “magic” of his tariffs and their promise to resuscitate the American economy—it is easy to lose the thread. Yet, the meeting managed to offer a revelation of sorts: Trump’s recognition of his unbridled reign, something long apparent but now made brazenly explicit. “I’m the President of the United States,” he declared almost giddily, while shamelessly insisting he had “the right to anything I want to do.” What left the audience even more baffled was his response to critics who accused him of acting like a dictator with his sweeping use of police authority and push to extend military presence. “The line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lot of people say: ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said. What enchantment has bewitched the American people that they cannot recognize, as Trump’s commitment to democracy waxes and wanes with his political fortunes and mood swings, their country has become nothing short of an imperialist nation, increasingly governed by a class of kleptocratic oligarchs? But never fear—Trump reassures us: “But I’m not a dictator.” Right. Naturally.
However, the show had just begun. Enter Steve Witkoff, a real-estate lawyer / Trump’s golf partner / self-styled envoy / iron-willed troubleshooter, who confidently asserted that the war in Ukraine would end “before the end of this year.” This came only weeks after he and Trump had spoken of an immediate deal that they planned to seal by welcoming Putin on a red carpet in Alaska. At least Trump conceded, “we didn’t get there,” when asked about the pantomime they both insisted on calling “great progress.” If there is one thing Trump and this new generation seem to share, it is their propensity to procrastinate. But not to worry: Trump will indeed succeed. After all, he is “the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel Award was ever talked about,” as Witkoff so perfectly put it.
After a long tail of loyalty declarations and inflated praises, I ransacked my vocabulary for a word to capture this circus and settled on “brainwashing” or “indoctrination.” But perhaps thinking of Republicans as brainwashed is too generous. Brainwashing would imply they are victims of a grand conspiracy, coerced into blindness by external forces. What we are witnessing is something closer to political paganism—a self-sustaining cycle of belief in which participants find comfort in tugging at intellectual (?) threads where fidelity outweighs evidence. To reason is to beat a dead horse, and listening is a forgotten luxury. Political dialogue is now devoid of the intellect that once—if ever—was the grist of its mill. To explain away their loyalty and grave need for approval as brainwashing or indoctrination, rather than a wilful abandonment of reason, is to hand them an undeserved pardon. But who needs reason, after all, when you’ve got three hours and seventeen minutes of applause?
