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On Tuesday, just over a mile from the White House, the classicist Mary Beard spoke to an audience about Roman emperors. “An autocrat is somebody who kills you when he’s being his most generous,” she remarked. “You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is wonderful! But the generosity of the autocrat is always potentially lethal.”
On Wednesday, Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. The mood was warm and convivial and, some might say, generous. Housing secretary Scott Turner offered a prayer that included: “Thank you, God, for President Trump.”
Was it just an accident that the TV camera framed the scene as the antithesis of DEI?Viewers could see seven men in suits with Trump in the middle, then another row of seven men in suits sitting behind. Nearly all of them were white. (Yes, there were women and people of colour at the meeting – but not many.)
Vice-president JD Vance was in attendance but there was no doubt whom this emperor had appointed as consul. Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire running the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), to speak before any of his cabinet secretaries after claiming that everyone present was supportive.
Wearing a black “Make America great again” cap, Musk jokingly referred to himself as “humble tech support” – people laughed dutifully – and claimed that his haphazard efforts to take a chainsaw to the federal government can save a trillion dollars and dig the country out of debt. “It’s not an optional thing, it’s an essential thing,” he said. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”
It sounds fine in theory. But “Doge”, mostly consisting of young male software engineers fuelled by pizza and Red Bull, has been a disaster. It fired the people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile then hastily tried to rehire them, only to find they were hard to contact because they could not access their work email accounts. It claimed to have saved $8bn on a terminated contract that was actually worth only $8m. Musk falsely stated that the US spent $50m on condoms for Gazans. And it emerged this week Doge quietly deleted the top five items from its public ledger of alleged savings after they turned out to be nothing of the sort.
Musk – who brought similar unholy chaos to Twitter when he bought it – admitted to the cabinet that Doge will make mistakes, but said it will fix them quickly. “So, for example, with USAid, one of the things we accidentally canceled briefly was Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”
Not reassuring.
Then came the most autocratic episode of the meeting. Trump, both generous and lethal, asked his cabinet: “Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw him out of here.”
To the crocodiles? Or as his pal Vladimir Putin favours, from a high window? From this assembly of fawners, flatterers and flunkies, there was nervous laughter and applause.
Triumphant, the president assured reporters: “They have a lot of respect for Elon, that he’s doing this, and some disagree a little bit but I will tell you for the most part I think everyone’s not only happy – they’re thrilled.”
Game respects game. Musk, a fan boy of far-right movements all over Europe, showed an impressively instinctive feel for totalitarianism.
He said: “President Trump has put together I think the best cabinet ever, literally, and I do not give false praise. This is an incredible group of people. I don’t think such a talented team has ever been assembled. I think it’s literally the best cabinet the country’s ever had … ”
Then came a telling slip from the world’s richest man: “I think the company [sic] should be incredibly appreciative of the people in this room.”
The cabinet on which Musk lavished such praise includes Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and Robert Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist who once dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park. Less Marvel Avengers than Star Wars cantina.
Kennedy was asked by reporters about a measles outbreak in Texas in which a child reportedly died, the first measles fatality in the US for a decade. His lackluster response: “It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
The whole meeting was yet another sorry exercise in worshipping an authoritarian and normalising a bully. Musk tried to defend the emails he sent to government employees, asking what they did last week, as not a “performance review” but a “pulse check review” because some people on the government payroll are dead.
Trump rounded off the meeting by observing: “The country’s got bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.”
Yet as Jon Stewart noted this week on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Doge will not touch the $3bn in subsidies given to oil and gas companies, a hedge fund loophole worth $1.3bn a year, or the $2tn given to defence contractors to build a fighter jet that will soon be obsolete. “This is where the real money is,” Stewart said.
Not even a functioning democracy ever did much about those. So hopes for a country run by a wannabe Caesar and his oligarch pal are not high.
