The Friday Brief: May 2, 2025

Inside: Trump’s North Korean Cabinet Show. Q2 Is Going to Be Ugly. Waltz Is Out. Scaling Up Corruption. “We’re Citizens”. RFK Will Kill Us All. What I’m Reading. Substack Finds. Scenes From The Home Front.

The Big Picture

Trump’s North Korean Cabinet Show

As the Trump White House “celebrated” its first 100 shambolic days in office yesterday, a remarkable new reality television show appeared on our screens as every member of the President’s Cabinet lined up

It was, as my fiancée Renee posted on Threads, “…THE WORST TV show I’ve seen in a long time. It’s called The White House Cabinet Meeting. Over-scripted. Terrible actors. 0/10. Would not recommend.”

I was a student of Soviet propaganda toward the end of the Cold War, a nerd’s nerd when it came to how the Red Menace was working tirelessly to undermine the West. We were, after all, the Main Enemy. I’ll skip taking you into the old Soviet-era wayback machine, but the bullshit enterprise of the USSR was a mighty, if clumsy construct before the fall of the Soviet communism. They ironically got better at it after the fall of Communism.

Now, America has a world-class propaganda machine of its own, but unlike the old Russian machine, it’s directed inward. Trump’s propagandists aren’t trying to persuade any new customers in the American electorate. They’re simply trying to maintain — and largely successfully — the rigid order and obedience of the Trump base. His catalog of disasters makes this harder to manage, and it will become even more challenging to spin it in his favor.

Still, the Cabinet meeting this week was an overt example of this internal state propaganda effort at its most fever-pitch level. It was more than the usual MAGA praise fest for the Dear Leader Donald. It was full-on “don’t be the first guy to stop clapping” North Korean People’s Congress action: