“Nothing about these gatherings was more fascinating than the peculiar ritual with which they concluded, in which speaker after speaker would get up and praise the host.” It would be a wild understatement to say that the first few months of the Trump era have been odd. But perhaps no single moment was more unusual than the scene earlier this week when Trump’s cabinet members went around the table and took turns praising their boss. Like so many of Donald Trump’s seemingly unprecedented rituals, this one can be traced back to Roy Cohn. From The New Yorker: Where Trump learned to love ritualized flattery. (For years I tried to get my kids to do this for me. In the end, we agreed that, in exchange for extra iPad time, they would occasionally nod approvingly.)