WASHINGTON — President Trump wanted to make cabinet meetings short again.
The president ensured that his first 2026 gathering of his secretaries on Thursday didn’t devolve into a three-hour, “boring” confab like last time, during which he was seen closing his eyes and faced accusations of dozing off.
“We’re not going to go through the whole table because the last time we had a press conference, it lasted for three hours, and some people said ‘he closed his eyes,’” Trump declared early on during the meeting, deciding to select only a few department and agency heads to speak.
“Look, it got pretty boring,” the president said bluntly to an explosion of laughter. “I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell out of here. I didn’t sleep.”
Trump also opted to forgo questions from the press — a very rare move by the outspoken president.
During his tighter cabinet meeting Thursday, which lasted about an hour and 20 minutes, Trump notably did not call upon Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or broach the controversy over his administration’s heavy-handed immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
Trump had met with Noem earlier this week for nearly two hours amid the firestorm that has ensued following the Jan. 7 shooting of Renee Good, 37, and the Jan. 24 shooting of Alex Pretti, also 37.
He then dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to recalibrate the administration’s law enforcement strategy on the ground.
Homan announced Thursday that there will be a “massive changes” and a drawdown in personnel there, though he didn’t say by how much.
Democrats have sought to pin much of the blame for the Minneapolis mayhem on Noem and have demanded Trump either fire her or they will move to impeach her should they retake the House after November. Trump has rebuffed those calls, insisting that Noem has done a “good job.”
During his cabinet meeting, Trump dodged Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is embroiled in an ethics scandal for allegedly having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate and committing travel fraud, as The Post first reported.
Trump also declined to call on Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Attorney General Pam Bondi to give updates, though he gave both of them shoutouts.
Rather than dwell on Minnesota, Trump instead seemingly curated the speakers to talk about what appeared to be some of his favorite initiatives.
Early on, he called on special envoy Steve Witkoff to talk about the efforts to rebuild the war-torn Gaza Strip and end the bloody war in Ukraine. Trump then claimed Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin agreed to halt the bombing of Ukraine for a week due to the cold.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week,” Trump revealed during his exchange with Witkoff. “It’s extraordinary cold — record-setting cold over there.”
Trump later highlighted Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin’s efforts to improve the permitting process in California in the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged the Golden State last year.
The president also had Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tout new drugs being added to Trump RX within the coming days, and had Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner discuss efforts to slash the price of housing.
At one point, the president asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright detail efforts to ramp up energy production, something that gave Trump a segue to rant against windmills.
“The windmills, by the way, are all frozen,” Trump riffed at one point, comparing windmils to “clean beautiful coal.” “The windmills aren’t turning. The windmills that these fools paid for.”
Perhaps the most significant announcement is that Trump will announce his long-awaited pick to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve next week.
“It’ll be a person that will, I think, do a good job. We’re paying far too much interest in the Fed,” Trump teased. “The Fed’s rates are too high, unacceptably high. We should have the lowest.”
