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There were navy blue and red baseball caps up and down the table, strategically placed in front of every cabinet member, and each bearing the message “Gulf of America”.
Yet the unorthodox collection of headwear, embroidered with Donald Trump’s forced new name for the centuries-old Gulf of Mexico, was far from the most bizarre aspect of an extraordinary White House gathering hosted by the president on Wednesday.
The cabinet meeting to commemorate the first 100 days of Trump’s second term was, in the view of some social media commentators, something more akin to a gathering of Kim Jong-un loyalists in North Korea, each successive speaker trying to outshine the other in heaping lavish praise on their dear leader.
There was the sight of Elon Musk, the outgoing head of the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, placing one of the red Gulf of America hats on top of the Doge one he was already wearing.
There was also an outing for a favorite Maga – Make America Great Again – conspiracy theory, with the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, repeating the debunked claim that 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children were somehow “lost” by the Biden administration.
Pam Bondi, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, played the role of chief cheerleader, causing the president to nod his head as she commended him.
“Mr President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country ever, ever,” she gushed. “[I’ve] never seen anything like it, thank you.”
Recalling her Tuesday visit to the Drug Enforcement Administration she added: “They said to me you, Donald Trump, have taken the handcuffs off of DEA agents.”
It was, however, some peculiar allegations made by Kennedy concerning the Biden-era health and human services (HHS) department that really raised eyebrows, coming soon after “loud quacks” from the health secretary’s duck-themed cellphone ringtone interrupted Trump, the Associated Press reported.
“We have ended HHS, as the role as effector, the principal effector in this country, for child trafficking,” Kennedy said.
He went on: “During the Biden administration HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery. And we have ended that and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children, 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
During his campaign for the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly misrepresented government data to falsely claim that 300,000 migrant children who crossed the border unaccompanied had gone missing, and said many of them were trafficked or likely to be dead.
The children were not in fact lost or missing. HHS data recorded only the numbers crossing the border, and tracking ceased when they were placed in homes and communities with relatives already in the US.
Kennedy did not expand on the “aggressive” efforts his department was making to try to find children who were actually never missing.
Much of the rest of the two-hour meeting, and a question-and-answer session with the media, was consumed by Trump talking up the perceived accomplishments of his first 100 days. He attempted to distance himself from Tuesday’s bleak economic data that suggests the US could be heading for a recession on the back of his tariff policies:
“I’m not taking a credit or discredit for the stock market,” he said. “I’m just saying we inherited a mess.”
Yet when the stock market was soaring during the final year of Biden’s presidency, Trump frequently insisted it was because investors were buoyant at the prospect of him returning to the White House.
The president was asked by a reporter on Wednesday if he had spoken with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, about the tariffs that have sparked a potentially costly trade war between the countries, and have led to predictions of empty shelves before the end of the year as imports dry up.
Trump said he had not, and offered his own prediction as to how Christmas might look for American families.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said.
“So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
