Cabinet meeting runs three hours and sixteen minutes; opens with a forty-five minute monologue.

The Cabinet meeting began at 11:00 AM Eastern. It ended at 2:16 PM Eastern. The opening monologue, before any cabinet secretary was given the floor, ran approximately forty-five minutes. The full meeting was carried live by multiple networks, archived on the official C-SPAN feed, and transcribed for the record.

A summary of the contents, drawn from the transcript and contemporaneous reporting:

The President said his administration was reducing prescription drug prices by 1,500 percent. Prices cannot be reduced by more than 100 percent without becoming negative numbers. The figure he intended, presumably, was that prices were being reduced by some unspecified factor. He said it twice. He attributed the reduction to Eli Lilly. He may have meant Johnson & Johnson. The two are different companies.

He said his administration would impose a “very substantial” tariff on imported furniture.

He said he had only “been at work” for several months of his second term, because the early period was occupied by redecorating the Oval Office. He has been in office since January 20.

He spoke at length about windmills. He spoke about the death penalty in the District of Columbia. He spoke about manufacturing, the trade deficit, federal staffing, and inflation. He observed, from the head of the table, that if he praised the physical attributes of the Attorney General, his career would be over. The Attorney General was seated immediately to his right.

He concluded that the country was “becoming very rich again.”

A serious cabinet meeting is a coordinating session. It is held to align departments, hand assignments, and clarify priorities. The transcript of Tuesday’s meeting contains, by my count, approximately eight specific policy directives and nineteen anecdotes. The ratio is the structural problem. A government cannot be coordinated from a monologue. A monologue is what is delivered when there is no longer a coordinating function being performed.

Calmly documenting the decline.