President Trump held one of his semiregular cabinet meeting extravaganzas on Tuesday that turned into a forum for him to vent about some of the many things that happened to be frustrating him.
It stretched on like a roller-coaster ride of emotion for 104 minutes as his behavior went from surly and splenetic to sunny and funny. The president aired grievance after grievance before suddenly switching topics to White House décor.
Weighty topics like Gaza, Ukraine and tariffs came up as Mr. Trump fielded questions, but the primary objective of the portion of the meeting open to reporters appeared to be providing Mr. Trump a chance to express himself.
“It’s hard to have a really successful country if you have a corrupt media,” he said early on.
He was still smarting over reporting by CNN and The New York Times from weeks earlier about a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that deviated from Mr. Trump’s insistence that the strikes he ordered on Iran had “obliterated” that country’s nuclear sites. Mr. Trump singled out segments he had seen on television and one reporter he said ought to be fired.
He was also upset with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for ramping up attacks on Ukraine, defying Mr. Trump’s calls for an end to that war. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
When a reporter asked who had ordered a pause in weapons shipments to Ukraine — an order that Mr. Trump abruptly reversed on Monday — he replied: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” He refused to elaborate.
He was more outspoken about his resentment of the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell. Mr. Trump looked across the table at a rumored replacement for Mr. Powell, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and said, “I like you better.”
A reporter tried asking Attorney General Pam Bondi about “some lingering mysteries” having to do with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who hung himself in federal custody while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Like many other prominent figures in Mr. Trump’s administration, Ms. Bondi had hyped conspiracy theories relating to Mr. Epstein and then failed to deliver new information supporting those theories to the president’s base, which is gnashing its teeth this week over what it sees as empty promises, or worse.
Mr. Trump was having none of it.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he cut in, his voice dripping with derision. “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy, with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”
Mr. Trump had been on a victory lap over the weekend after a two-week period in which he seemed to be getting so much of what he wanted. And his mood could only have been boosted on Monday evening when his dinner guest, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, disclosed that he had nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Trump is nothing if not mercurial, and after he got most of his complaints out of his system to his audience of cabinet secretaries and reporters, his mood seemed to morph on the spot.
He stopped railing against the various developments in the news cycle that were bothering him and started talking instead about drapes, silverware and lighting fixtures that were available to him as a resident of the White House. He described a grandfather clock he took from the State Department.
Looking around excitedly at the paintings on the walls around him, he gave an impromptu history lesson to his cabinet about some of the men who lived in the White House before him. There were pictures of James K. Polk (“he was sort of a real estate guy, people don’t realize”); Dwight D. Eisenhower (“he was the toughest, I guess, until we came along”); and “Honest Abe” Lincoln (“that picture was in his bedroom”).
There was a picture of John Quincy Adams that had a particularly fabulous frame. “Look at those frames,” Mr. Trump said. “You know, I’m a frame person. Sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures.” The cabinet chuckled.
He looked up at the ceiling and wondered aloud: “You see the top line moldings? The only question is — do you gold-leaf it?”
Fortunately there was a roomful of advisers to help him decide.
“Linda, do you have an opinion?” he asked Linda McMahon, the secretary of education. Ms. McMahon replied that she rather liked the idea of gold leaf on the ceiling.
Mr. Trump turned to the room at large.
“Who would gold-leaf it?” he asked. “Could you raise your hands?”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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