MSNBC host Jen Psaki barely held back her laughter while airing a montage of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members fawning over him during a marathon meeting on Tuesday.
The three-hour, 17-minute meeting Psaki described as “sycophantic” featured the president’s top officials seemingly one-upping each other to see who could praise him more.
Psaki, a former Biden White House press secretary, said the Cabinet secretaries “would make North Korean leaders like Kim Jong Un or Russian President [Vladimir] Putin blush,” later adding that “almost no real business of any kind was actually discussed.”
“I mean, Trump has surrounded himself with people who already treat him like a dictator,” Psaki said before playing the clip from Tuesday’s meeting.
Among those who attended the meeting was Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who invited the president to see his “beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor.”
“Your tireless campaign and your relentless messaging made people realize the American dream isn’t dead,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said. “It’s just been smothered, and we’re unsmothering it and setting it loose.”
Psaki can be seen smirking as some Trump officials in the montage paid him far-fetched compliments. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed Trump is “going to save the whales on the East Coast,” a nod to the administration’s efforts to review offshore wind farms. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in 2023 that there was “no scientific evidence” that noise from offshore wind sites could “potentially cause mortality of whales.”)
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins thanked Trump for “saving college football” and said she believes “we’re in a revolution.”
“1776 was the first one. 1863 or so, with Abraham Lincoln, was the second. This is the third, with Donald Trump leading the way,” Rollins said.
Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said “there’s only one thing” he wishes for, and that’s for the Nobel committee to “finally [get] its act together” and realize the president is the “single finest candidate” for the award.
Psaki mocked all the groveling, joking that someone “scripted all of that fawning praise for Trump.”
“I mean, the revolution lady, somebody scripted that for her. God bless,” Psaki said, referring to Rollins. “Or maybe they came up with it on the spot. Not sure which is worse.”
The host went on to call the meeting “basically just a big old group hug for Trump’s ego,” and slammed the officials for treating him like a dictator.
“I mean, that appears to be the key to getting a Cabinet-level position in the first place, right?” Psaki said. “Not your qualifications or your experience or what you would even really do in the job, but how much you’re willing to say or do whatever it is that Trump wants.”