An explosion of enthusiastic applause for Joseph Stalin followed a Communist Party conference in 1937.
The ovation went on for three minutes, four, five…
Palms were getting sore, arms were aching, and the older members of the audience were panting with exhaustion.
According to dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the clapping continued for 11 minutes. “It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop?” he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago.
“With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!”
It was only after the director of a local paper factory, “an independent and strong-minded man”, sat down that the hall finally fell quiet. “They had been saved,” wrote Solzhenitsyn. “The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.”
During Tuesday’s marathon 3-hour and 16-minute Cabinet meeting at the White House, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff offered a masterclass in sycophancy. One real estate developer sucking up to another.
“Mr. President, working for this government, for you, is the greatest honor of my life,” he told his golfing buddy. “I tell it to everybody, and I really do feel that way, and I thank you because it’s a privilege to go out there and represent you in your humanitarian effort, in your goals of solving conflicts all over the world.”
Israel had just killed 20 people, including journalists, at a Gaza hospital, and Trump was deploying U.S. troops to crack down on Americans in their own capital. But the irony of casting the president as a peacemaker was entirely lost on Witkoff.
Everyone in the room was undoubtedly aware that Vladimir Putin was outmaneuvering both men, but they were still open to celebrating Trump’s successes in foreign wars few could even name.
“I think there were actually more than seven conflicts that you put to bed in the last eight months,” Witkoff groveled on. “And I hear these—I travel all over the world. In hostage square, they talk about you reverentially. It’s really quite amazing. I sometimes wish that I had a cam recorder with me and I could I could put you right there as I listened to it.”
Then there was the kicker. You could sense his colleagues kicking themselves for not thinking of it.
“Your team is nothing short of incredible,” Witkoff continued, “and there’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel Committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace (sic), this Nobel award was ever talked about to receive that reward.
“Beyond your success is game-changing out in the world today. And I hope everybody one day wakes up and realizes that.”
His nodding colleagues burst into applause. Some even said, “Amen.” I kid you not.
Perhaps they were wondering how long they should clap?
Trump made it easy for them. He just kept talking.
The president informed his Cabinet—and the world—that he was retiring the term “great, big, beautiful” bill because it was better explained as a “massive tax cut for the middle class.”
His underlings duly noted the change. No matter if it was untrue and a cut for the rich. If Stalin mispronounced a word (the Soviet leader was born in Georgia and Russian was his second language), his minions speaking after him would garble the word the same way.
Everyone who spoke on Tuesday had taken the Kool-Aid and recited Trump’s talking points rather than offering any real insight into how their respective departments were performing.
Windmills are bad, and so are dirty doors in restaurants, mucky traffic medians, and transgender people in sports. Taylor Swift getting married is a good thing. Or, at least, it was on Tuesday.
For RFK Jr. to have veered so far from the values of his family is hard to watch. He praised Trump, the climate change denier, for saving the whales. And this from the man accused by his daughter of sawing the head off a whale and driving it home.
One couldn’t help but wonder what his father and uncle would have made of such toady behavior.
Presumably, Trump finds it funny to sit the biggest misfit in his administration right next to him. Still, Pete Hegseth took full advantage, telling him: “Thank you for your leadership, for your boldness, for your clarity… for common sense.”
Hegseth got the memo. Trump was not a dictator. He was the President of Common Sense.
On Trump’s other side, Marco Rubio trotted out his usual spiel about stopping illegal immigration. He may be the one man in the Cabinet who actually knows what he is doing. But he sold his soul when he kissed Dear Leader’s ring.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick clearly has his own take on American history. He thinks he is working in “the greatest Cabinet working for the greatest president.”
CNN plays a montage of Trump cabinet officials kissing the Dear Leader’s ass. This is crazy! pic.twitter.com/5J3rponMZs
— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) August 27, 2025
The most blatant example of obsequiousness was from the Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer. She couldn’t be picked out from a line-up by her Cabinet colleagues and clearly wanted to make sure Trump remembered who she was.
Chavez-DeRemer spent thousands of taxpayer dollars hanging a giant picture of his face on the wall of her department, and she wanted to ensure he hadn’t missed it.
“Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor, because you are really the transformational president of the American worker,” she told him. “I was so honored to unveil that yesterday.”
She obviously missed her boss’s point that big and beautiful was yesterday’s fake news. If she doesn’t ensure the next quarter’s jobs figures are in the black, she could soon be left looking at the banner of Trump’s massive mug with the tourists outside in the street.
Always the TV producer, the former ‘The Apprentice’ boss never lets his team forget that he has the power at any time to tell them, “You’re fired.”
“Each one of these people spoke,” Trump said as the extended session drew to a close. “If I thought one of them did badly, I would call that person out.”
The cardboard characters around the table stiffened. Had they groveled enough?
Trump even reminded Witkoff that there are no mulligans in politics and he needed to see results. “You’ve told me that a few times,” he said of his envoy’s insistence that he was the right man to end Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“Unless he was saying it just to build up my ego,” added Trump. “But it’s not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff.”
If any of his Cabinet members were hungry, thirsty, or needed the bathroom, nobody was saying. They listened intently as their leader droned on, repeating his theories on crime and punishment and how lucky we all were to have him in charge.
Perhaps some of them have read the postscript to Solzhenitsyn’s story.
Later, on the night of the 11-minute applause in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the factory director was arrested. The secret police had been monitoring the audience to identify any independent individuals. He was imprisoned for 10 years.
And as he was being led away, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
The post Opinion: Stalin’s 11-Minute Ovation and Why Trump’s Suck-Up Cabinet Won’t Stop Clapping appeared first on The Daily Beast.
