Former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser says the fawning by President Donald Trump’s cabinet at Tuesday’s meeting was at a level that rivals the world’s biggest autocrats.
Jake Sullivan told The Bulwark’s podcast that the over-the-top schmoozing was akin to a “Kim Jong-Un documentary,” referring to the North Korean dictator who does not permit anything to be said about him that is not full of praise.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sullivan said, according to Raw Story.
He continued, “This looks a lot like Erdogan in Turkey. It looks a lot like Orban in Hungary. But with one big twist, which is in both of those cases, it took a long time for them to play out their strategy.”
“We’ve been at this now for seven months,” Sullivan added. “And you just look at the breakneck speed with which Trump is moving to try to break down the various guardrails of our democracy.”
Sullivan, 48, noted that some of the praise was so absurd that it bordered on parody. He did not cite examples, but Trump’s labor secretary told him he had a “big, beautiful face,” his agriculture secretary thanked him for “saving college football,” and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, told him he was the “single finest candidate” in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize.
These remarks were no joke to the president, Sullivan said, which makes the praise “also a little bit scary.”
“And there is a kind of ludicrous, humorous quality to it,” he said. “But it’s also a little bit scary because it reflects something deeper and dangerous about the president’s autocratic tendencies and the fact that these people around him are just so slavish that I don’t think they would stand up to him on anything at any point.”
Sullivan, who is now a professor at Harvard University, expressed concern about the future of the U.S. now that Trump is surrounded by his most die-hard sycophants.
“Without those kinds of guardrails, I think it’s uh it’s bleak what we may be facing here in the coming days and months,” he said.
Trump, 79, has leaned into the idea of never leaving office.
“I’m not a dictator,” he said at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting while also suggesting that some Americans would not mind if he were one.
The post Ex-Biden Aide Says Trump Cabinet Meeting Resembled ‘Kim Jong-Un Documentary’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
