AUGUST 27, 2025 – Theories abound about the Pyrite President’s persistent grip on a sizable chunk of the American electorate. In my opinion no single theory is the Holy Grail. After all, we’re a country of nearly 340 million souls under the influence of trillions of algorithms that we’ve unwittingly self-tailored to our individual preferences. But two ubiquitous and omnipresent ingredients—opposing sides of the same coin—color our perceptions, opinions and pontifications: evidence and the lack thereof.
Every time Trump opens his mouth or posts the work of his thumbs (or is it his elbows, figuratively speaking?) on the keyboard of his iPhone, I ask the same old tired question: “Where’s your evidence?” But of course, it’s a wholly rhetorical question, because he never proffers any evidence. Made-up-stuff off the cuff, complete B.S., incoherent meanderings, and gross mischaracterizations, let alone outright barefaced lies, don’t count.
The flip side of the coin is the cumulative Everist of evidence that the miserable man whose lodestar is pyrite with a false shine, has no business being in charge of the business of governing the sometimes United, sometimes not United, States of America.
Innumerable books, screeds, memes and articles have already been written, read and shared, documenting, re-documenting, gurgitating and regurgitating . . . the evidence that at last calibration far exceeded the elevation of 29,031.7083 feet above sea level. But yesterday’s compound evidentiary bonanza was worth a few full yards of additional height to the ever growing mountain of damning substantiation.
I’m referring, of course, to the three-and-a-quarter-hour cabinet meeting over which the Pyrite President presided; not in secret, not beyond the reach of “the media,” but in full view and sound of a bevy of reporters, camera-operators and sound people invited—conscripted, it seemed—by the Narcissist himself. For the marathon session, the Secretaries of Sycophancy engaged in a round robin tournament of obsequious accolades that served no purpose but to stroke the distorted ego of a man more fragile than a soap bubble floating over a field crammed with thistles.
The compound nature of “the evidence” comprised the following elements:
1. The duration of the session—not three-and-a-quarter minutes but three-and-a-quarter hours!
2. Characteristics of the sycophants: a. Not a group of school children in playclothes vying for first dibs on lunchroom treats but full-fledged (apparently) adults wearing suits; b. Not a group of full-fledged adults randomly selected off the backstreets of Cincinnati (apologies to all with connections to that great third tier town) but members of the presidential cabinet entrusted with oversight of the most powerful governmental agencies in the world; and c. Including the likes of Marco Rubio, whose indelible record includes relentless excoriations of the Narcissist.
3. Complete absence of substance: The ratio of sycophantic nonsense to actual policy discussion was infinity to zero.
4. Shameless memorialization of the session: “evidence of the evidence.” (Who in their right mind—of any of the personages around the table—would participate in such a session knowing that it was being captured in Surroundsound and living Technicolor?)
The unedited episode would be prime time parody material if it weren’t for the gravity of the condition of our democracy. Trump’s bizarre meeting reminded me of an “invention” I’d devised during a particularly excruciating meeting of my peers and me during my days as a corporate manager. Our boss had invited to our weekly “Direct Reports” meeting, his boss, who lived and reigned “on high” and was rarely seen or heard from except once a quarter—unless some greater distraction in his busy world required a last minute cancellation, in which case the scheduled quarterly encounter would be re-scheduled . . . for the following quarter. To “show off” our department, our boss started things off by welcoming the Big Boss (to a round of applause initiated by our boss’s chief sycophant), then saying, “[Big Boss], I thought we’d go around the table so that each division manager can give us a quick rundown on the highlights of their respective business lines. [Chief sycophant], you want to go first?”
With that solicitation began a nearly full hour of unadulterated B.S., replete with the currently most-in-vogue phrases, such as “value added measures,” “maximizing shareholder value,” and “thinking outside the box.” I stubbornly refused ever to use any of these abused vacuous phrases. The worst of them, I thought, was the wholly ironic, “thinking outside the box,” since in my judgment, the very utterance of the term was proof—not mere evidence—that the person making the statement was most definitely NOT “thinking outside the box.”
As my peers droned on about how they were “knocking the ball out of the park” and thus, “maximizing shareholder value,” I developed the idea of a simple “B.S. meter.” I figured that across corporate America I could sell a million of them and become independently wealthy within six months. Once I’d achieved that status, I’d never ever have to attend another B.S. corporate meeting.
The meter would be about as straight up as the corporate nonsense it was designed to expose. At the foot of each chair in a conference room would be two pedals wired (back then; today, they’d share a wireless link) to a central meter fully and clearly displayed on a wall at the head of the room. The right pedal would be the “B.S.” side and the left pedal would be for “Non-B.S.” Whenever someone was spouting off, each participant in the meeting could press the pedal of his or her choice, depending on whether the listener thought the speaker was talking B.S. or not. A simple electronic element incorporated into the system would continuously aggregate the results and display them on the visible B.S. meter on the wall. I almost burst out laughing as I considered the effect that such a meter would have on corporate meetings. Soon my devious mind was imagining the use of the B.S. meter at corporate board meetings and annual shareholder meetings.
Suddenly, I heard my name called. It was time for me to “highlight” my division. For a nano-second I thought I could upend my boss’s day and shock my peers by describing my idea for the B.S. meter. But in the next nano-second, I bit my tongue—hard—to preserve my tenuous position in the corporate pecking order, not to mention my salary, health insurance, 401(k) matched contributions, prospective “ICP” (“incentive compensation payment”), and annual stock options. In other words, I caved. I said what the boss wanted his boss to hear; that year-to-date, my division’s revenues were up and our expenses were down; that our “pipeline was full” and we were “on top” of risk monitoring. I refused, however, to ape my colleagues who reported that their divisions were “just happy making money for the bank” or that we were “optimizing shareholder value,” and I certainly didn’t say, “everyone in my group is ‘thinking outside the box.’” Instead, I said, “We’ve just hired a couple of newly minted liberal arts graduates who are . . . hitting the ball out of the park.”
If ever there has been a time and place for the B.S. meter, it was in yesterday’s cabinet meeting of the Pyrite Presidency. Except . . . I now realize that in the current era, the premise of the B.S. meter is hugely flawed. The assumption is that meeting participants are not so disabled by their sycophancy as to be unable to distinguish B.S. from non-B.S. and, just as critically, that if meeting participants do know the difference, they’re willing to call out B.S. for what it is.
For we live in times more deeply fraught than we realize if the premises of the B.S. meter are no longer valid, be it in a cabinet meeting or in the 2026 mid-term election campaign and beyond.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
