Sure, you may own a Roku box or an Apple TV. You might even have a subscription to Netflix and Amazon Prime. Still, your entertainment menu is sadly lacking. After all, why watch The Handmaid’s Tale when you can spend $80 million on your own personal fireworks show?
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recalled the scene at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, when the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping was interrupted by the strike on Syria.
“Just as dessert was being served, the president explained to Mr. Xi he had something he wanted to tell him, which was the launching of 59 missiles into Syria,” Ross said. “It was in lieu of after-dinner entertainment.”
Was he having the same great, great, simply beautiful chocolate cake as the president of China at the time? What pairs best with cake and throwing around massive amounts of military hardware? A nice spätlese? Will there be a cheese plate?
That little tale of casually making an international attack that risked embroiling the United States in an ongoing conflict with Syria and/or Russia into a momentary amusement, might be expected to cause astonished gasps among people who recognized the staggering inappropriateness of the attitude and the shocking lack of weight given the event. But Ross knew his audience.
As the crowd laughed, Ross added: “The thing was, it didn’t cost the president anything to have that entertainment.”
Ha! Donald Trump gave his guests a super-great thrill and all it cost was tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, a few lives on the ground, and the risk of war. Good one!
The new commerce secretary also expressed how surprised he was to find that government employees were not all idiots.
Ross, a billionaire financier, is new to government service. In the lunchtime conversation with David Rubenstein, co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, Ross reflected on his first impressions of public service.
“I’ve been heartened,” he said. “I thought the quality of people in the government was not as high as it has turned out to be. There are actually quite a lot of very good, very serious, very intelligent people wanting to do their best. It’s just they’ve been trapped in a fundamentally dysfunctional system.”
Funny. I thought that the billionaires Trump brought in to run his government were a bunch of supercilious assholes who had no concept of government’s purpose and even less idea of what it means to be a public servant.
I’m not “heartened.”