onOn Tuesday, just over a mile from the White House, classicist Mary Beard spoke to the audience about the Roman Emperor. “A dictator is the one who kills you when he is his most generous,” she said. “You go to dinner, you think, wow, this is amazing! But the generosity of a dictator is always fatal.”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump held his first full cabinet meeting. Some may say the mood is warm, cheerful and generous. Housing Secretary Scott Turner offered prayers, including “Thank you, President Trump.”

Was it just an accident that made the TV cameras assemble the scene as Day’s antithesis? Viewers could see Trump in the middle of the seven men in suits, then another row of seven men in suits sitting behind him. Almost all of them were white. (Yes, there were women and people of color at the meeting, but not many.)

Vice President JD Vance was present, but there was no doubt who appointed the emperor as consul. Trump invited Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who runs the so-called “Doctor of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), to speak in front of his cabinet secretary after all attending claimed to be supportive.

Wearing a black “make America great again” hat, Musk jokingly called it “humble tech support” – people laughed faithfully – and insisted that his unplanned efforts to steal the federal government’s chainsaw could save a trillion dollars and delve into the country from debt. “It’s not about options, it’s important,” he said. “If we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt.”

In theory it’s fine. But Doge, composed primarily of young male software engineers fueled by pizza and Red Bull, was a disaster. They fired people who oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile and quickly tried to rehire them, but found it difficult to contact them because they were unable to access their working email account. This claimed it saved $8 billion on a termination agreement that was actually worth just $8 million. Musk mistakenly stated that the US spent $50 million on Gazan condoms. And this week, Doge appeared this week. Doge quietly deleted the top five items from the suspected savings public book after it turned out they weren’t that kind of thing.

Musk brought similar unholy confusion to Twitter when he bought it – to the cabinet, Doge admitted to making a mistake, but that said it would fix them quickly. “For example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally cancelled temporarily was Ebola prevention. So we quickly restored Ebola prevention, but there was no interruption.”

I don’t feel safe.

Then came the most dictatorial episode of the conference. The generous and deadly Trump asked his cabinet. If so, we’ll throw him out of here. ”

For crocodiles? Or through a high window, in favor of his fellow Vladimir Putin? There was a nervous laugh and applause from this fawn, flattering, this reunion.

Winning, the President assured reporters: “They have a lot of respect for Elon, he does this, and a bit opposed to some, but I think most of the time everyone is happy – I think they’re excited.”

Games respect the game. A boy who is a fan of the far-right movements across Europe, Musk showed an impressive instinctive sense of totalitarianism.

He states: This is an incredible group of people. I don’t think we’ve ever had such a talented team. I think it’s literally the best cabinet this country has ever had…”

Then came the slips that spoke from the wealthiest man in the world. [sic] We should be very grateful to the people in this room. ”

The cabinet that Musk lavished with such praise include Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, accused of sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine conspiracy theorist who once abandoned a bear cub who died in New York’s Central Park. Less than Marvel’s Avengers Star Wars Cantina.

Kennedy was asked by a reporter about the outbreak of measles in Texas, where a child was reportedly killed. His inactive response: “That’s not uncommon. There’s an outbreak of measles every year.”

The entire conference worshiped authoritarianism and was another sorry to normalize bullies. Musk tried to protect government officials from emails they sent to government employees and asked them what they did last week. It’s not a “performance review,” but a “pulse check review” because some people on the government’s salary are dead.

Trump concluded the meeting with the observation that “the country is bloated, fat, disgusting, incompetent.”

Still as John Stewart It’s been attracting attention this week At Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Doge will not build fighter jets that will soon become obsolete on subsidies given to oil and gas companies, loopholes for hedge funds worth $1.3 billion a year, or $20 subsidies given to defense contractors. “This is the real place for money,” Stewart said.

Even a functioning democracy did not do much about them. Therefore, he wants a country run by aspiring Caesar and his fellow oligarchs.