Cabinet as a Show Stage – How Trump Demonstrates Power, Shifts Reality, and Pushes the Country to the Brink

An hour into the cabinet meeting, seven members of the administration had already delivered their remarks. Special envoys and the departments of finance, commerce, health, housing, energy, and the environment spoke one after another, embedded in a format that was less an exchange than an exercise in self-affirmation. Since returning to office, Donald Trump has used these sessions as a stage for praise, repetition, and the performance of control. It is a ritual meant to suggest strength while revealing how much politics here has become narrative.

The Senate has just voted 45 to 55 in favor of not keeping the government open. Democrats are blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and several Republicans also voted against it. The shutdown takes effect tomorrow at midnight.

While successes were being invoked in the cabinet room, Democrats in the Senate simultaneously blocked a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. Negotiations with the White House are ongoing, the clock is ticking. If the money runs out on Friday, a partial government shutdown looms. Trump told cameras he wanted to avoid that. Behind the scenes, the issue is carving out funding for internal security to buy time. The context is explosive: the escalation of immigration operations, the fatal shootings of demonstrators in Minneapolis, the calls for consequences. Funding becomes a question of power.

"Hopefully there will be no shutdown. We are working on that right now. I think we are getting closer. I do not think the Democrats want that either. That is why we will, I think, work very bipartisan to prevent a shutdown. We do not want a shutdown."

This power question also shows in the tone of the administration. The so-called border coordinator floated a possible reduction of operations in Minnesota, but tied it to "cooperation" by the states. At the same time, he demanded that local jails inform federal authorities so that people could be transferred while still in custody. That would be safer and more efficient, he said. The logic is clear: less visibility, less oversight, more access. At the same time, the administration took a legal hit. An appeals court ruled the homeland security secretary's decision to revoke protections for Venezuelans unlawful. For now, this has no practical effect because the Supreme Court has allowed the measure to remain in force until a final decision. Law is thus suspended, political will dominates.

Another signal came from Georgia. The FBI searched election offices in connection with the 2020 presidential election. A Democratic senator spoke openly of federal agencies being misused as instruments of personal power and retaliation. The accusation stands that institutions are being mobilized to settle old scores. In foreign policy, too, Trump set accents that appear improvised rather than strategic. He said he had asked the Russian president not to attack Kyiv for a week because of the extreme cold. Putin had agreed. It is a request, not an agreement, and it shows how humanitarian emergencies become backdrops for symbolic gestures. At the same time, Trump announced he would reopen Venezuelan airspace to commercial flights after years of closure. Americans could soon travel again, he said, they would be safe. A decision that ignores political reality on the ground and shifts responsibility.

Domestically, the conflict continues to intensify. Republicans are pushing a sweeping package to tighten voting rules. Proof of citizenship, photo identification, restrictions on mail voting, bans on certain voting systems. Critics have warned for years that exactly such rules effectively exclude millions of people from voting. The numbers have long been on the table. Nevertheless, the package is sold as a trust-building measure, an absurdity. Amid all this, there was room for vanity. Trump joked that his health secretary could become more popular than he himself in the midterms. He talked about a new state platform for purchasing medications, promised progress without committing to timelines. And he joked about a previous cabinet meeting at which he supposedly had not fallen asleep. Laughter in the room, cameras rolling.

What this meeting reveals is not a lack of activity, but a pattern. Politics is broken down into individual announcements, into declarations, into claims that are rarely fully scrutinized. Housing figures are glossed over, legal defeats relativized, violence at home rhetorically covered up. At the same time, pressure from outside grows: religious leaders in Washington described the fatal operations against demonstrators as a moral failure and openly sided with migrants. Words of weight that do not fit the cabinet narrative. In the end, the impression remains of a state in permanent performance mode. A president who wants to show control while fronts harden. A government buying time while fundamental questions remain unresolved. And a country that, caught between budget crisis, legal conflicts, and violence, lacks a clear answer. In this setting, politics is not explained, it is staged. And that is precisely the problem.