That’s Chancellor Trump’s favourite food. That’s The Great Leader’s meal that they’re sharing. They’re not “enjoying a meal”, they’re showing obeisance by eating and praising what he puts in front of them.
It’s not lunch, its a demonstration of loyalty.
This is their lives now.
Or to put it another way, they are all bullies, and all bullies are cowards. They will suck up to Trump. They will bow and scrape and grovel and tell him that MacDonalds is better than a perfectly seared rare eye fillet, and they will resent every second of it, and bottle it up and dump it all on their families and their staff and their departments and the American people, and it doesn’t matter how much suffering they inflict, it will never make the grovelling any easier. But they’ll do it anyway, because they’re scared of what will happen to them if they don’t.
I was afraid that Trump would pick a bunch of highly competent evil people for his cabinet, but I’m slightly reassured he’s still up to his old nonsense of picking people for the drama. I guess it’s the advantage of Trump not being ideologically driven, but instead wanting to be famous and turning everything into reality television.
It’s extremely disheartening that people are ignoring a necessary strategy here - that they not obey in advance.
It’s especially nuts with RFK - I saw some NYTimes article interviewing health professionals who were heartened that he “recognized” various health issues in the US. The problem is, he fundamentally doesn’t - acknowledging a rising cancer rate doesn’t help solve the problem if he thinks it’s caused by chemtrails. It’s impossible for him to be part of a solution - he might as well not acknowledge the problem at all. for all the (total lack of) good he’s going to do.
RFK announcing that he’d immediately end any research into vaccines and diseases made me think of that bit from Airplane:
Only the response to RFK starts off with “Looks like I picked the wrong administration to get sick with a virus” and ends with “…exist as a human being.”
“The censorship cartel must be dismantled,” Carr wrote last week on X. He added that the FCC under his leadership will also go after TV networks. " Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource — our airwaves. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation."
While I don’t think it’s necessarily part of a conscious strategy on the part of Trump, I’ve heard some political analysts speculate that some of the most extreme and unqualified candidates may not actually get confirmed, but that even if they don’t it could help Trump get through some other awful people who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance. The idea being that there are a few GOP Senators out there who are willing to vote against confirming some of Trump’s picks, but don’t want to incur the wrath that would come from voting against large numbers of them. So they vote against Gaetz, maybe Gabbard or Hegseth, but let everyone else sail through confirmation to make it clear that they aren’t just trying to block everything that Trump wants to do. So we end up with a bunch of industry lobbyists and business executives running all the government departments because they seem reasonable by comparison.
