Pam Bondi seemed a little nervous during Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting on April 30, the week the administration celebrated his first 100 days in office. Vice President J.D. Vance was seated directly across from the president, and she was seated immediately to Vance’s left — meaning Trump would practically be looking right at her as she delivered her report on the state of the Justice Department.
Bondi, the nation’s attorney general, is one of more than two dozen billionaires, conspiracy theorists, television hosts, and otherwise die-hard MAGA personalities that Republicans allowed Trump to install in the most important positions in government. As such, they were provided a seat at this Cabinet meeting, which featured “Gulf of America” hats set up in alternating colors around the table. Trump did not choose them to oversee America’s federal agencies because of their qualifications, of which most of them possess very little (though Bondi was a state attorney general). They were selected for their ability to flatter Trump, of which all of them possess a great deal. These televised Cabinet meetings are a prime way for them to showcase their fealty and devotion.
Trump sat with his arms under the table, calling on his deputies one by one. They thanked him effusively. They touted his leadership and fearlessness. They laughed along as he joked about the federal judges blocking his administration’s agenda, including his efforts to send immigrants to foreign jails without due process. Bondi was ready to perform after Vance calmly explained to the assembled media that they should be reporting on Trump’s historic accomplishments rather than “fake BS.” Bondi wasn’t so calm. She cleared her throat.
“Mr. President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever … ever,” she said, awkwardly emphatic. “Never seen anything like it. Thank you. Your directive to me was very simple: Make America safe. And, despite that, we’ve still been defending over 200 civil lawsuits filed against you.”
Bondi read some statistics about the government’s fentanyl seizures, “which saved — are you ready for this, media?” She turned to the camera. “258 million lives.” She turned back to Trump. “Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk,” she said. “They’re dropping dead, and no longer, because of you, what you’ve done.”
It’s unclear what kind of math Bondi used to determine that Trump saved the lives of 258 million Americans, equal to around 75 percent of the nation’s population. She had said the previous day that Trump had saved a comparatively modest “119 million lives.” A source with knowledge of the matter says Bondi intentionally inflated the number at the Cabinet meeting not just to flatter Trump, but to troll the media. Regardless, the exaggeration was so absurd that even White House officials were howling with laughter about it later.
According to two other sources, several Trump aides responded to Bondi’s boast by actively scouring the internet for evidence that Democrats and media figures were, in the words of one of these sources, “flipping the fuck out.” This was, in part, so they could compile a dossier of the reactions, print them out, and show them to Trump, knowing he would delight in the outrage. The Cabinet meeting was a success.
The way Trump is handling these meetings with his top lieutenants “definitely gives off Dear Leader vibes, like what you would see with Kim Jong Un or [Vladimir] Putin,” says Virginia Canter, the chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at Democracy Defenders Fund. She says it shows the president “constantly needs to be reassured of loyalty” and sees his Cabinet members as “basically his personal staff, and they’re there to stroke his ego.”
Trump’s demands for flattery are costing a fortune. His new administration is only a few months in, and already the total price of just three such initiatives — a flashy, Trump-flattering ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security, a gigantic military parade in Washington, D.C., on Trump’s birthday, and the repurposing of a palatial airplane from Qatar as Trump’s new Air Force One that he can use in his post-presidency — will easily top $1 billion. And that’s just the beginning.
The sprawling efforts to flatter Trump are about more than serving his ego, according to Anthony DiMaggio, author of Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here. “They have to do with a president who needs to be not only at the center of a media circus, but who needs to be told ritualistically over and over how great he is,” DiMaggio says. “What’s interesting to me about this, as a political scientist, is that it’s not just a personality-based thing or a defect. It’s a broader pattern that has to do with behaviors that are overlapping with authoritarian politics and ideology.”
DiMaggio says that authoritarianism scholars have long identified “the idea that the first term is the trial run, where the person is figuring out what works and doesn’t work for what they’re looking for in politics, and [they] kind of get what they want, and then they realize they need to get rid of anybody who’s not a yes-man or -woman. They need these sycophants at every level who will not raise questions, because otherwise you don’t get the political outcomes that you want. If you want to engage in authoritarian politics, you have to get rid of the people that Trump calls the ‘deep state,’ the bureaucrats who are standing in your way and have a lingering commitment to checks and balances and the rule of law.”
The all-encompassing effort to satiate Trump’s ego — in Cabinet meetings, TV appearances, and beyond, throughout multiple branches of government — has been essential to the president’s autocratic efforts. Trump and his administration have plunged the United States into a series of constitutional crises, engaged in overt corruption, and overseen genuine democratic backsliding — all of it buttressed by propaganda designed to further inflame his personality cult.
Trump’s Cabinet meetings are like what “you would see with Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin.”
It’s not about the welfare of the nation. It’s about promoting an American president whose White House calls him “the King,” and helping him accumulate power to match.
Asked for comment, a White House official says, “Everything President Trump does is to benefit the American people, and he has secured many GOOD deals on their behalf.”
‘North Korean’
Throughout the government, agencies are making it their mission to propagate Trumpism and do his bidding. There’s no better example than Bondi’s Justice Department, which, contrary to recent history, operates without any veneer of independence and instead enforces the Trump line and aids his propaganda efforts.
A day after she was confirmed, Bondi issued a memo telling Justice Department employees they must “zealously” defend Trump’s views and policies and act as “his lawyers.” She announced the formation of a “weaponization working group,” at the DOJ, designed to probe the prosecutors who charged Trump as well as those who investigated and charged the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to help him cling to power. Trump has demanded, via executive order, that independent agencies adhere to legal interpretations favored by the “president and the attorney general (subject to the president’s supervision and control).”
Under Ed Martin, an election-denying, Trump-adulating lawyer, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia took on a comically MAGA bent. Martin publicly described himself and his team as “President Trump’s lawyers,” there to “protect his leadership as our president.” A large printout of Trump’s executive order on “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” — designed to expand pretrial incarceration, remove homeless encampments, and crack down on petty crimes — was mounted on the wall next to the elevators, according to a photo obtained by Rolling Stone.
Martin’s behavior unnerved others who had worked for the Justice Department for years, some of whom began using one simple term to describe what he was doing: “North Korean.” As one senior White House official notes: “Ed goes a little overboard; that’s why the president loves him.”
Trump seems to welcome the comparisons to totalitarian regimes abroad. According to this official, in recent months, when advisers have flagged to Trump that some of his critics liken his zeal for military parades to customs in North Korea or other repressive states, the president has said those countries do that because they “respect” their leaders and those displays of national military might are good for the population’s morale. (Trump did not seem to acknowledge these regimes do those things because the dictator is making them.)
After Martin failed to win enough support from Republicans to keep his U.S. Attorney job permanently, Trump made him his pardon attorney — and Martin is now publicly pledging: “No MAGA left behind.”
“Everything about the way the Department of Justice is operating now is different from how it’s worked in the past,” says Liz Oyer, the department’s former pardon attorney, who was fired after refusing to allow actor Mel Gibson to own guns again. “The directions appear to be coming from the top down.” She adds, “They’re treating the department as though it is President Trump’s personal law firm.”
It is growing progressively more difficult by the day to characterize Trump’s second administration as anything but an American caricature of the totalitarian hero worship enforced by regimes like the one in North Korea. Under those kinds of dictatorship, for instance, so much of the art and entertainment exists simply to make the Dear Leader happy.
When Trump isn’t busy commanding his government to launch a criminal investigation into Bruce Springsteen and his liberal political activity, he and his administration are doing things like launching a takeover of the Kennedy Center in D.C., in large part because Trump has never gotten over the fact that many artists who’ve performed there openly hated him and his policies.
According to a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it, Trump has told several of his close associates about some of his plans for the Kennedy Center as he moonlights as its chair. First off, he has said he wants to “review” lists of upcoming seasons’ scheduling, planned performances, and slated artists, in part so that the center can screen for anti-Trump performers who might make comments onstage trashing the president. Trump has also demanded the Kennedy Center programming be made more “pro-American,” and has told people close to him that he’d even accept presentations in the Oval Office pitching new musicals or plays, especially if the original material is anti-“woke.”
He has also inquired to at least two confidants about naming a renovated wing or sections of the center after himself, and even whether it would make sense to put a “statue” of himself in the building — much like how there is a famous, large bust of JFK in the venue. (That may be because the place is named after President John F. Kennedy.)
“President Trump cares deeply about American arts and culture, which is why he is revitalizing historic institutions like the Kennedy Center to their former greatness,” says the White House official, adding: “Halting anti-American propaganda is critical to protecting our children and fostering patriotism.”
Some of the Trump administration’s cruelest and most expensive propaganda is ostensibly designed to scare immigrants into either self-deporting or avoid traveling to America at all — but even these messages have doubled as efforts to promote and flatter Trump.
The Trump administration budgeted $200 million for ads in which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, speaking in front of a row of American flags, issues warnings to immigrants. Noem repeatedly thanks Trump in these taxpayer-funded ads, which were announced in February.
“Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border, for deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and for putting America first,” Noem says in a 60-second version of the ad. “President Trump has a clear message for those that are in our country illegally: Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.”
Noem said in February that the ad campaign was Trump’s idea, and that he specifically asked that she thank him. Trump said, according to Noem: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”
In a second round of DHS ads, Noem credits “President Trump’s leadership” for her department catching criminals. Those ads include footage from Noem’s grotesque photo op at CECOT, the infamous mega-prison in El Salvador where Trump sent hundreds of immigrants without due process, in defiance of a court order.
The administration decided there was such “an unusual and compelling urgency” for these ads that officials selected two Republican firms to work on the campaign without a competitive bidding process. They exempted the deals from review by Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The White House official says “it is normal for an agency head to thank their principal — in this instance the president of the United States — for their policies and leadership.”
“They’re treating the DOJ as though it is President Trump’s personal law firm.”
While this hasn’t been disclosed in procurement data, records filed with the Federal Communications Commission show the Trump campaign’s ad-buying firm, Strategic Media Services, has actually been buying some (maybe all) of the ads for DHS. Trump’s campaign committee disclosed paying $270 million to Strategic Media Services during the 2024 race, most of it to place ads. Records show the firm buying TV time for many DHS ads, including for a version in which Noem starts: “Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border and putting America first.”
A DHS spokesperson denies knowing anything about Strategic Media Services, and says the department “doesn’t have control of subcontractors and cannot tell a vendor who or who not to hire.”
“For all their talk about wasteful spending, the Trump administration is frivolously spending taxpayer dollars for a political-ad campaign to stroke the president’s ego,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) tells Rolling Stone.
‘Trump’s Birthday Parade’
The administration’s propaganda around every arm of its policies is in service of Trump’s emotions. He must be thanked for closing the border. He must be praised for his haphazard tariff scheme throwing the economy into chaos, which officials insisted proved his dealmaking prowess, even as financial markets cratered. Bondi talks about fentanyl seizures as if Trump himself is cuffing drug runners. The most pointed example of the administration’s slavish devotion to the president’s self-image isn’t on the cable-news airwaves, though. It’s within the walls of the White House, which has been transformed into a veritable shrine to his visage.
A garish painting of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt against him near Butler, Pennsylvania, last year has replaced a portrait of Barack Obama. A tacky portrait of Trump with the American flag superimposed across his face — the same image he has long used as his Truth Social avatar — has been crammed in between paintings of former First Ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. The West Wing walls now feature a piece of boardwalk-caliber art depicting Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln posing in front of the American flag together. Trump is in the foreground. (The art retails online for $27.)
Trump’s gaudy sensibilities have seemingly been indulged without limit. The Oval Office has been gilded to the hilt, with much of the molding painted gold and an assortment of gold statuettes occupying the bulk of the once-venerated room’s ledge and table space. The president bragged about his “24-karat gold” office during a meeting in May with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney. (The Oval Office statuette of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt, however, is bronze.) A different White House official favorably compares the new decor and faux glitz to that of Iraq’s late genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein, whom Trump has praised for his prolific ability to slaughter “terrorists.”
The White House is merely a physical realm, though. The ability to deify Trump as the god-king of the United States is unlimited on the internet, and the administration’s social media has been rife with AI-generated images depicting Trump as everything from the new pope to a muscle-bound, light-saber-wielding figure posing in front of bald eagles and American flags. It’s supposedly being done in the name of trolling, a word the White House has used to describe the administration entertaining the idea that Trump could stay in office beyond 2028. Trump has seemed serious about the notion, claiming he’s “not joking” about it before noting that there are some “loopholes” that could allow him to serve beyond a second term.
“The administration is frivolously spending taxpayer dollars to stroke the president’s ego.”
Trump serving a third term would be blatantly unconstitutional. The attorney general, of all people, should understand this, but Bondi refused to rule it out during a Fox News interview in April, only saying the president would “probably” be finished after his current term is up, and that “we’d have to look at the Constitution.”
Of course, Bondi is not one to say no to the president. In May, she authorized the administration to accept a rather extreme gift from the royal family of Qatar, one that played to Trump’s lavish tastes: a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet, known as a “flying palace,” worth hundreds of millions of dollars. While the emoluments clause of the Constitution explicitly bars federal officeholders from accepting any present or gift from a king, prince, or foreign state without approval from Congress, Bondi — a former lobbyist for Qatar — deemed the gift permissible because the plane will replace Air Force One and not belong to Trump personally.
Trump has said he will not use the plane for personal use, but in private, he has referred to it as “one of my new big, beautiful planes,” as Rolling Stone reported. The jet is expected to be transferred to Trump’s presidential-library slush fund after he leaves office. In the meantime, experts say it could cost taxpayers $1 billion and multiple years to retrofit it for use as Air Force One. Lawmakers have expressed concern about upgrading the plane so Trump can maximize his time luxuriating in it as president. Trump has scoffed at the bipartisan criticism of what many have called a bribe, insisting he would be “stupid” to not accept the plane.
“This is the $400 million golden jet that personifies corruption,” says Canter of the Democracy Defenders Fund. She adds that the plan to retrofit it and then turn it over to Trump’s library fund “would be the greatest abuse possible…. It’s as plain as day that he just wants his hands on a golden plane.”
The Defense Department said it had accepted the “sky palace” from Qatar as it prepared an exorbitant military parade through the streets of Washington, D.C. The parade was scheduled for June 14, the 250th anniversary of the Army’s formation, which also happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday. The celebration is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars, and feature tanks and other armored vehicles, aircraft filling the skies overhead, and thousands of soldiers traveling into town from bases around the country.
The government has attempted to downplay the idea that the parade is meant to be Trump’s birthday party. The White House official says, “The Army parade is part of a yearlong celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The Army parade is being held on the Army’s anniversary — June 14. It’s not President Trump’s fault that his DNA is USA.”
However, the president insisted to administration officials that it take place on his birthday, according to two sources with knowledge of his demands. He didn’t want a grand July 4 military parade, like the disappointing one he demanded in 2019. He wanted a big bash on his birthday.
Several Trump advisers and aides have privately referred to the event as “Donald Trump’s birthday parade,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Trump’s desire for a military parade is at least partially borne out of wanting to stick it to France. According to former Trump aides, in July 2017, the president convened several advisers in his White House private dining room to ramble on about the Bastille Day celebration in Paris that he had just attended with France’s leader, Emmanuel Macron. He went on for a long time about the pageantry, the large number of soldiers, the tanks — oh, boy, did he talk about the “big” tanks! — and the fireworks, instructing his staff: “Get it done.” He added that there was no reason that America couldn’t show the French, and everyone else around the globe, how performative militarism is done on the streets of a great capital city.
“In some ways, this is the greatest tragedy,” Canter says about the birthday parade. “This is not a parade that honors our veterans or our military … who have lost life and limb. This is to honor a man who never served one day in the military. And it’s again, reminiscent of the Dear Leader actions taken by the leaders of North Korea and Russia.”
The GOP has introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday.
It’s not just Trump’s administration marshaling resources to burnish the president’s idea of himself. Republicans in Congress, who are supposed to be acting as a check on the president’s power, are no less desperate to please him. They have almost completely abdicated their constitutional duty so that Trump can impose his will without restraint, sitting idly as he repeatedly undercuts their authority over everything from funding federal programs, as lawmakers have appropriated, to managing the Library of Congress. They’re also finding increasingly cultish ways to show their devotion to their leader.
House Republicans didn’t just pass Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy in May, for example — they did whatever they could to make the bill about Trump himself. Trump loves calling it a “big, beautiful bill,” so Republicans named the policy package that slashes social services the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” In the final stretch before the bill’s passage, they decided to rename the bill’s “MAGA Accounts,” which would give $1,000 savings accounts to babies born in the next few years, to “Trump Accounts.”
The abhorrent cultishness of all this has reached such towering heights that a ray of self-awareness has entered the chat. In February, according to a source present for this meeting, several senior House Republican aides from different congressional offices gathered at the Capitol-area restaurant Butterworth’s, touted as the latest martini-heavy MAGA hot spot. At one point, after several rounds of drinks, a leadership aide took out a pen and pad of paper and started asking the table for increasingly ridiculous ideas for legislation that could bring a smile to the president’s face. The brainstorming session — described to Rolling Stone as “obviously” in jest — produced bullet points of mock legislation like making Trump’s birthday a holiday, and naming the National Zoo “Donald J. Trump Presents: the D.C. Zoo.”
Was it a joke? The GOP has introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday a holiday.
Last year, Republicans introduced a very real resolution to rename the Washington area’s Dulles airport after Trump, and another to rename America’s coastal waters after the president, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) citing how Trump “took several commendable actions for our oceans.” Shortly after Trump took office this year, Republicans tried to formally censure a bishop at the Washington National Cathedral whom Trump attacked after she delivered a sermon asking him to have mercy on the less fortunate. They’ve also introduced bills to rename D.C.’s Metrorail the “Trump Train,” to amend the Constitution so he can run for a third term, to put his face on the $100 bill, and if that wasn’t enough, to put his face on a newly created $250 bill.
“The most valuable bill for the most valuable president!” said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).
Trump wants to see his face on something much larger than a piece of currency, though. He talks to this day about how much he deserves to see himself on Mount Rushmore. Yes, Republicans have introduced a bill to make it happen.
Trump is serious about this, according to current administration officials who’ve heard him discuss it. One of them says that since returning to office, the president has told close allies he wants to be the first American president to live to see his face sculpted into the South Dakota cliff. Trump, this official notes, pointed out that George Washington, who had been dead for around 140 years by the time the memorial was completed, never got to see his face put on the mountain.
“He’s not kidding,” says the Trump administration official. “He wants his fucking face up there with all those other greats. Donald Trump does not think Teddy Roosevelt was a better president, I’m sorry to say.”
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