Bulwark Takes - We Sat Through a Painful Trump Cabinet Meeting So You Don’t Have To

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger watched an hour-and-a-half long Trump cabinet meeting and it was a mess. From ranting about $1,000 pens and fake gold columns to personal attacks on Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia and Jerome Powell, Trump spent more time complaining about the Kennedy Center than he did on foreign policy. We break down the top five most unhinged things that happened during Thursday's meeting.Text TAKES to 64000 to get a FREE pocket pivot and their 10-pattern sprayer with the purchase of ANY size Copper Head hose. Message and data rates may apply.

Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark. I'm here with Andrew Egger, partner in crime, author of Morning Shots, must-read newsletter. We just watched an hour and a half Trump cabinet meeting. We made it. At various points, I didn't know if we were going to make it, but we did. And it wasn't as tongue-bathy as some of the other ones were, but it was pretty tongue-bathy. At one point, I think Doug Bergam talked about a statue being of Trump in Venezuela.

I literally think they're going to put up a statute of President Trump. And I'm not being, it's not a political statement. It's an actual thing. That would be a great arm. No, because it's like they view President Trump like Simon Woller. And he thought it. He's like, I'm not trying to be political. And Trump was like, oh, I would love that.

But that's not even like the top of the craziness here. Andrew, thankfully, has organized his thoughts better than I have. We're going to gamify this a little bit. We're going to do top five, wildest, craziest moment. moments, most mind-boggling utterances from the cabinet meeting, Andrew's going to do his five. I'm just going to set it up. I have a few that I'm going to talk about, but I kind of agree with most of your five, Andrew, but there's one or two that I think you missed. But let's go with your number five. This is from we're going in order from least wild of the five to most wild. So number five,

what do we get? At least wild to most wild within reason, almost everything that in this entire cabinet meeting was kind of insane. So we're already working with the crim of the crem de la crem here. One of the reasons why, like you said, it was not as tongue bathy as it could have been or as these sometimes are, is that they're actually

was not all that much talking from the cabinet secretaries in this meeting. Donald Trump was in his bag. He was just going. He was pre-associating. He was doing the weave. And number five was a moment that came at the end of a very, very long rant. About a 15-minute, just

free associative spiel. about how everybody wants to sue him for trying to make DC beautiful again. And the ballrooms, they ought to be suing Jerome Powell instead for the problems with the Fed renovation building. And how, you know, it's good that Janine Piro and Pam Bondi are going after him and going after the Fed. But nobody's, but everybody's mad about the Kennedy Center. Everybody's met about the ballrooms. He goes on about this for about 15 minutes. And then he gets to this moment where he has somehow worked his way into talking about the pens he uses to sign.

things. So let's, let's, let's hit that. See, this pen right here, this pen is an interesting example. It's the same thing. So this pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well. I like it. But I can't have the pen the way it was. You know what it is. I don't want to give too much publicity, but they do treat me a way of Sharpie. So I came here, they have $1,000 pens. And you know, you hand pens out, you're signing and you hand them out. You're handing them with all these people. Sometimes you have 30, 40 people. And they were, you're handing them. You're handing them. You're a thousand dollars apiece. Beautiful pen, ballpoint. Thousand who's gold, silver, gorgeous,

but I'm handing out to kids that don't even know what they're, what is this, mommy. It's kids. They're getting a pen for a thousand dollars. They have no idea what it is. And I feel guilty because I'm like, you know, by nature, I don't, you know, it's the government. I love the government. Like I love myself economically. I want to save money. So I'm saying, this is crazy. And it had another problem. They didn't write well. I take it out. And I signed it and there's no ink. And I got all you people looking and you say, there must be something wrong with Trump. And I'm signing. And there's no ink in the pen and it costs $1,000. This one I called the guy. I said, I'd like to use your pen, but I can't have a gray

thing with a big ass on it. St. Sharpie. As I'm signing a trillion dollar airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets, brand new B2 bombers of which we just ordered plenty, I can't do that with the press. Use your pen, but I like the pen the best, but I'll sign it. I could do like Biden did, you know? Give it to somebody else to sign or an auto pen. Or maybe sign it separately in another room,

but I can't use your pen. He said, well, I can make it nicer. He said, what can you do? He said, I'll paint it black. I said, that's nice. And I can even paint the White House on it, sir, if you like. In gold. Almost real gold, not bad.

And I can even do your signature, sir. And by the way, this was not stage. I just saw the pen sit there. I thought that this as an example. It wasn't staged. She actually, no script writer had the thought to offer that genius example of saving the government money like the president did with his totally invented nonsense about $1,000 pens before and the sharpies we have now. That's a long clip. I wonder if Matt's going to cut that down a little bit.

And we're going to watch the entire audience for this thing. We sat through this whole thing and then we lost everybody with 90 seconds of the president blathering about pens. That came, I already said this. that came at the end of a 15-minute uninterrupted spiel, totally free associating from the president. I mean, there's nothing going on in the world. So it's not like there's anything important that we have to talk about. But, I mean, it's just this is what these cabinet meetings are. And I guess he thinks they're going to go great for him.

Okay. I'm glad we played all two minutes of that or whatever it was. Because at first I was like, okay, it's not that crazy. But then he just kept going and kept going and kept going. And I'm wondering if he actually did talk to Mr. Sharpie or whoever the executive was. that Sharpie. And if they did have a conversation about the color of the pen. Also, if you just sort of step back and you think about it, it's like an old man who loves his Sharpies is a little bit weird in its own right. And then I did like the line where he was like, I love the government,

like I love myself economically. Yeah, it's good stuff. That's pretty good. It's hard. It's amazing that that's five, because that, if you just ran across someone talking about Sharpies like that and your normal course of life, you would wonder if they ate the Sharpies. And that was like something. They had a weird relationship with the pen. But yeah, that's number five. All right, what's number four? This episode is brought to you by pocket hose. The world's number one expandable hose. Old-fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot. But the copperheads pocket pivot swivels 360 degrees for full water flow and freedom to water with ease all around your home. When you're done, the rust-proof anti-burst hose shrinks back down to pocket size for effortless handling and tidy storage.

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size copperhead hose, just text takes to 64,000. That's takes, T-A-K-E-S to 64,000 for your two free gifts with purchase. Takes to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for detail. Number four, we got number four, came at the end of another long spiel. It wasn't 15 minutes, but it was a lengthy, lengthy spiel about how bad and evil and racist and, you know, hating for the country are, our Democrats are. And this is, what he had to say. He had gotten done with a bunch of, you know, hits on Joe Biden and hits on Kamala Harris. And then he pivoted into talking about the cognitive abilities of Gavin Newsom and his own. So let's listen to that a little bit. I don't want a person with mental disability to be

my president. I mean, you don't want to have a person with mental disability being a president. And Gavin Newsom said that he can't read a speech. He can't do almost anything. And then he said He's as dumb as all the people in the room, and he got accused of being a racist, which was an amazing saying. I thought it was the worst interview I've ever seen anybody give. He's actually a very stupid person. So I believe he's out of the running. I think that that statement, that interview, he admitted that he's a stupid person. I don't want a stupid person being president.

You know, I'll say it right now. I say it because don't press never reports it. I'm the only president that ever took a cognitive test. I took it three times. It's actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn't hard for me. It starts off with an easy question, and by the time you get to the middle, it gets suffered.

By the time you get to the end, very few people can answer those questions. They get very tough, mathematical equations and things. I took it three times. I aced it all three times, in front of numerous doctors that I have no idea who they are. And I was told when I went in, they said, Doc Ronnie told me,

My current doctors who are fantastic doctors, they said, well, if you take it, you know, it's Walter Reed. It's essentially a public hospital. And if you do badly, it's probably going to get out. But I aced it. I got them all right. And one doctor said, I've never seen anybody get them all right. I've been doing the test for 20 years.

I want people, I would love to see anybody that's a president or a vice president or anybody that has any chance of being a president, I would like to. to see them take a cognitive test. Aye. This is like a classic Trump line, right? He always talks about the cognitive tests at the rallies. But there was like some extra good detail this time where he's talking about, and you know, those questions, they get really hard at the end.

You know, like, these are dementia tests to make sure that, to make sure that your mind is fully functioning. He's like, I had a doctor tell me I was the only person he'd ever seen in 20 years who aced it. He's talking about how his, his AIDS, including his White House doctor, as he's going in to take it are kind of discouraging him from taking the cognitive test like, you know, if you don't do so well on this, it's going to leak out. But he showed them, you know, he went in and he proved once and for all that his mind is functioning at normal baseline, as opposed to Gavin Newsom, who was so foolish as to admit that he has had, you know, learning disabilities growing up and things like that. So that was

number four. Well, it was interesting that you picked that as number four because it was both, it was a little wild. And I actually do believe that the doctor probably told him that, but that didn't mean anything because the doctor knows he wants to hear it. But it also, that one turned like particularly nasty. First of all, it's just not like gloss over the fact that Gavin Newsom, you know, he's not saying he's dumb. He's saying he's dyslexia. Like it's not, you know, it's a particularly horrific thing for Trump to like basically say

that, you know, he's disqualified himself because of that. But then Trump pivoted from there to not only talk Newsom's intelligence, then go after Joe Biden, which is he par for the course. he always does that. And then he went after Obama. And he was like, Obama was not a smart guy either. Like the guy edited the Harvard Law Review. I mean, come on. Objectively, Obama is not dumb. I don't know, man. I don't know. Those questions, they get pretty hard. They're at the end of the cognitive. I don't know. It's crazy. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy that he does this. It's crazy that this happens in the first place. And then it's just so megalomaniacal

that he's like, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to show him. Like, like, I really do He believes that. He's like Barack Obama could never. No, it's projection, obviously. It's insecurity. He feels like he's the dummy. All right. Number three, what do we got?

Oh, three. Okay, now that was just the stupid stuff. All of the rest is extremely grim. So just buckle up. Hold on. If we're going to go to the grim stuff, I'm going to just throw out one stupid thing that's not on this.

I actually saw the list beforehand. That's a good idea. Because we're going to get more serious here. There was a moment in here where Trump is sitting. sitting next, I'm sorry, I'm laughing. He's sitting next to Pete Hagseth, his defense secretary, who is kind of embattled over all the stuff. And Trump's been quietly or not so quietly,

throwing him under the bus for what's happening in the war. And he says something like, I was talking to someone the other day who really was critical of me for appointing you defense secretary. I'm not going to tell you who it was. And Pete Higgs is just the force to sit there listening to this. And he's like, now can you speak? Pete, and then Pete does this whole shtick.

But if it just struck me as like the most, you know, if a boss ever did that to me, it'd be so humiliating. But I guess that's the price of admission when you're in the cabinet. All right, away from the silly stuff to the serious stuff, what's your number three? Yeah, so this is bad. This is one of Trump's gripes with the war. And not surprisingly, all the rest of this stuff is about the war. Because as you might remember, Sam, there is actually a very serious conflict going on in Iran right now.

And Trump has a lot of gripes about a lot of it. We're going to get to the actual stuff that matters a lot, which he's weirdly glib and dismissive about. But he has retained a grudge since the very opening days of the war where basically, you know, right when we first went to fight in Iran without consulting anybody except Israel, you know, we took all of our European and NATO allies by surprise by going in there. And they took a couple of days to really figure out to what extent they were going to get involved. a lot of these allies, you know, aren't getting involved at all. You know, Germany, for instance, and, and the EU have sort of said this isn't our war. But Great Britain, you know, belatedly, the UK belatedly said, you know, we'll send some ships just a few days into this conflict. And, you know, very famously at that point, Trump said, we don't need them.

So even in this, in this cabinet meeting, it seems like he had kind of half forgotten who, like, when they had offered that and what he himself had said, because he turned down the ships. because he basically said the war is already over. That was like three or four days into the conflict. We're now four weeks in, but he's still talking about how, you know, they didn't want to send ships until after the war was over. So like that's all crazy. But this actual moment that I want to talk about here has to do with NATO and just his perspective on NATO in general.

And I mean, it's one of the kind of baldest statements we've seen from Trump yet that he is really considering just sort of dropping any remaining obligations that America has to this treaty alliance. All right, let's play. Nobody's a match for the United States, but they're not a match for the United States and small potatoes. That's why I'm so disappointed in NATO because this was a test for NATO. This was a test. You can help us.

You don't have to. If you don't have that, you know, if you don't do that, we're going to remember. Just remember. Remember this in a number of months from now. Remember my statements. They have an expression, a great expression, never forget. I can never forget. I mean, first of all, that's so gross.

I mean, to repurpose the never forget thing for this specifically, for the UK, taking a couple of days to send a ship. I mean, like, that's just on its own merits. That's insane. But it's also very grim for, you know, even just in the immediate term, thinking about the war in Ukraine, right? I mean, the war in Iran has been sort of bad news for Ukraine in a lot of respects. I mean, we have pulled certain, like, military.

installations of our own out of that theater to bring them to Iran, as was also discussed in the cabinet meeting today. Russia has been able to reap a real economic benefit from the war because not only has the price of oil gone up, and so they've been able to sell at higher prices, but the U.S. has taken a certain number of sanctions off of Russian oil, so it's easier for them to sell more at higher prices and just have those extra infusions of cash into Russia's economy. So like all that is bad enough on its own. And then to hear Donald Trump talk this way about NATO with with a real implicit threat there toward just sort of taking the ball and going home when it comes to different kind of NATO priorities, which are also our priorities, by the way,

in everybody's mind except for Donald Trump's. So that was a, that was, you know, again, like I say, we're getting into the pretty just actually grim and grisly stuff here. Yeah. And I would just only add, first of all, thank you for making note of the never again thing, galling stuff. But, you you know, obviously, it's, if this is a one-way street, it's, you know, not in NATO's way. I mean, Trump threatened to take over Greenland for months, okay? And then on top of that, all of our aid basically is dried up towards Ukraine, which is in huge native priority. So if you're talking about never forget, I mean, they won't forget either.

All right. Number two. Okay. So, yeah, number two. This has to do with why we went into Iran in the first place, which, you know, there have been a million different explanations given. But this is the one that Donald Trump seems to have settled on in complete defiance of all factual reality and of his own administration's insistence a year ago that they had destroyed Iran's nuclear program. Here is the president saying that if we had not gone into Iran, you know, last month, they would have had a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks. And if we didn't attack with the B-2 bombers, they would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks of that, maybe four weeks. But between two and four weeks, they were planning to have a nuclear weapon. If we didn't hit them at that time with the B-2 bombers, and one of the great air raids in history, maybe the greatest.

Just to put a fine point on this, nobody in Donald Trump's cabinet at any point has said anything like this. And they know, they didn't say it today. They haven't said it all along. they've given lots of shambolic and silly explanations for the war, some of which are kind of mutually contradictory. But nobody is saying this because it is obviously insane. Everyone knows this is not the case. There are some concerns, as Marco Rubio has laid out at the time, that Iran was building up its ballistic missile defenses to the point where, you know, it was going to be able to operate in the region with more impunity. That's a, that's a at least more plausible sounding

thing that they have alleged for why they had to go in right now. But it's the President of the United States that is repeatedly, apparently he thinks this, because he has said this in a couple times in recent days as well, he actually thinks it's the case that even though they somehow destroyed, you know, obliterated Iran's nuclear program last year, surprise, they're actually two weeks from a bomb. Right. Nobody, I don't know, what can you even say about this? It's insane. That's not how any of this stuff works, but the president thinks it's how it works. And nobody in that room, even though they won't say it, obviously no one will correct him. Apparently they're not even correcting him in private because he keeps repeating it.

Well, see, I thought you were going to mention something else with respect to nukes because there was another moment in there that kind of went under the radar. And it was J.D. Vance, who has been very quiet about this stuff as we reported today in Mooringshots. And he was talking about it because Trump pressed him to speak. And he was talking about essentially a backpack nuke. And we don't need to play the clip, but I'll just read it. He said, when I say options, I think it's important the American people know options for what. And it's options to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon.

And this is where it gets a little wild. You talk about people who walk into a crowded supermarket and have a vest on and they blow up the vest and a couple of people get killed. And that's a terrible tragedy. What happens when what's on the vest is not something that can kill a couple of people, but can kill many, many, tens of thousands of people? That is the most important American national security objective that exists for any. administration at any time is you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon. I mean, that is like, you know, I remember the Iraq war days where I was like, you can't have

Saddam possess a nuclear weapon and they have them. This is like you can't, this is like a stage well beyond that where he's invoking the idea that someone's just going to walk with the backpack nuke into a crowded supermarket and blow you up and take out in your entire city. I mean, that is just like wild stuff. So, you know, they really rationed it up. If the world worked anything like these people say it works, I don't know if they actually believe it. I don't know if JD thinks that that's a real problem or anything.

Like if it were actually the case that you could go into a country, completely obliterate their nuclear program. You know, you take out everything you can take out. It's an absolute military victory, you know, unparalleled success. And then one year later, they are weeks away not only from creating a nuclear weapon. Not only, I mean, like, that's crazy enough on its own, but creating a nuclear weapon that is of such a kind that it can be, you know, smuggled into a country, strapped on a person's backpack and used to carry out a terror attack, you just stick a fork in everything. There's no point in doing any sort of foreign policy. There's no point in diplomacy. Go home and sort of enjoy your last

days with your family, right? I mean, like none of this, for good, thank God, none of this is how the world works. Unfortunately, it is apparently the way that some of the most powerful people in the entire world, the most powerful people in our country, certainly, view it or at least see fit for God knows what reason to talk about it. So, yeah, I don't know. J.D. is having a hard time. He's seeing his own presidential ambitions go up and smoke as this conflict goes along. You know, he's seeing his polymarket odds, you know, hit the floor. So he's going through it, you know, whatever. He can, he can, he can, he's got his mind on other things. Maybe that's the, maybe that's the most generous. It was a bit of a wild, it was a bit of a wild spectra that he raised

there. All right. All that consider, what could possibly be? be your number one? What is the number one? Well, this is, I don't know. Now that you mention it, maybe that was actually the craziest now that we actually took off the fucks through it a little bit. It is so crazy that the president apparently cannot be disabused by hook or by crook of this notion that Iran was two weeks from a nuke.

But this is the last thing. And this is, I have this as the last thing just because it is such amazing wishcasting from the president of the United States as the straight of Hormuz. Everybody, you know, we've been talking about it like crazy. Everybody's been talking about it because it, is giant economic problem that 20% of the world's oil is snarled up in there. And Iran is only letting ships through that it wants to let through. And it's charging a toll on them.

And, you know, it's gases up a buck 50 around America. And, you know, it's only going to get worse. It's a big problem unless there's some actual solution here. And Donald Trump has a few things that he's been willing to say about the Strait of Hormuz. But one thing that he cannot stop himself from saying apparently is, I just don't know what the big deal is. It's going to be fine. America doesn't matter for us at all. You guys should stop caring so much about the Strait of Hormuz.

So here's him saying that. The amazing thing is we don't need the Hormuz Strait. We don't need it. We don't need it at all. We have so much oil. Our country is not affected by this. Our country is not affected by this. It is true in an extremely narrow sense.

We have enough oil to drill ourselves. It is unlikely that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will actually result in you going to a gas station and being unable to pull any gasoline out of the tanks. That's not really the problem here. The problem here is it's a giant, unprecedented in size and scale global oil shock that is going to, at the very worst, really hurt the economy and at the, you know, it is not at all implausible that there could be a significant crash year. Obviously, Donald Trump is looking very hard at trying to find some off ramp for this conflict, because unlike the nukes thing, where I genuinely don't know if he actually believes that, because

he keeps repeating it and it seems so crazy that he wouldn't keep saying it if he didn't actually believe it. This I don't think he believes. I mean, he is actually looking pretty hard for a for an off ramp to this conflict because he knows how bad these these price shocks are going to hurt him politically. But the fact that he is still making this case in public, like, guys, come on, it's not even our oil. It's fine. It's good for our companies, actually. I just, I still cannot wrap my mind around the fact that he thinks that this is an argument that plays for him in any way. Well, that and then, you know, at another point during this, he talked about how grateful he was that the Iranians led in or led through eight chips full of oil through the straits.

So straits don't matter. What difference does it make of their late letting those eight chips through? It's not the biggest gift in the world. I think that's a fine top. I think I probably would swap your one and two. I think nuke probably is more important in the grand scheme of things. But I think it's a good top. I will say you left out two little bitties, which wouldn't even make my top five.

but I think are worthwhile for the viewers to hear. One was he had this aside about Tony Blinken, Biden's old secretary of state, where he basically said, yeah, Tony Blinken was quoted as saying, first of all, he was watching Tony Blinken. He's saying, this is Trump saying. He was saying that they should have done it,

the implication being that Tony Blinken had admitted in this speech that Biden should have done the war in Iran that Trump was now doing. we went back and looked Tony Blinken was saying they should have reentered the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement with Iran, not invade Iran, so slightly different. And then this one is, it's almost even hard to kind of, I don't know how he got to this one, but it just, you know, classic weave where they're talking about something and then they're

talking about like the National Guard and how clean D.C. is. And then they're talking about like, you know, buildings in D.C. and then they're talking about the Kennedy Center and they're talking about fixing up the Kennedy Center. They're talking about how the roof on the Kennedy Center is leaking, and they're talking about the columns on the Kennedy Center and how they were actually fake gold. And then he was talking about how he's fixing them up

and that they were painting them a beautiful white color, beautiful cream white. And everyone is saying how much more beautiful it is. And you can't imitate gold. It just went on and on and on about the columns at the Kennedy Center. And I was just sitting there being like, Like, this man's mind is, is, is, is, uh, gelatin at this point. Yeah. All of that, by the way.

But this is the stuff he loves to talk about. Yeah. No, it's amazing. I mean, like, and he got some questions about the straight at the end, which is when he started saying some of this stuff. Um, but, but when you compared just the stuff that he said in his own opening remarks, uh, and, and, and in the cabinet proceedings about the war in Iran and the, and the straight of Hormuz, it was a couple minutes.

And then he went on for, like I was saying, this was all part of that answer that culminated in those, in that pin clip we just talked about, right? but he's going on about the collars he's going on about the decorations in the oval office he's like he's going on about how you can't do fake gold fake gold is always really noticeable and then he's like but not like in here these these decorations 24 carrot which is just like it's just amazing i guess it's possible i don't think those are 24 carrot gold all that all that chintsy stuff he has up around the white house oh come on but that's what he carried even at this moment even at this like insanely insanely

fraught and bad moment for his presidency, for the country, for the world, for the global economy. He'll talk about that stuff. Yeah, sure, if you make him,

like whatever. I guess he's got some thoughts. He's going to mostly defer. He's mostly going to just tell you he's not going to tell you what he's going to do. But you get him going on any of that shit

that he does with his actual day, any of the redecorating, any of the renovations, any of the D.C. stuff and he will talk your ear off for hours on end, it seems like. Yeah. Well, we listened to it so you guys didn't have to. Andrew, thank you for doing the list, buddy.

Really appreciate it. If you disagree with Andrew's rankings, just drop your own rankings in the comments section. We'll take a look at them and see whether we could have done better. For those who didn't watch the cabinet meeting but did watch our encapsulation of it, our summary of it, thank you. We appreciate it. We do this for you.

In return, just subscribe to the bulwark. That's all we ask. Andrew, take care about it. I'll talk to you later.