Trump Uses Cabinet Meeting to Vent About Epstein, Putin and Powell

President Trump held one of his semiregular cabinet meeting extravaganzas on Tuesday that turned into a forum for him to vent about some of the many things that happened to be frustrating him.

It stretched on like a roller-coaster ride of emotion for 104 minutes as his behavior went from surly and splenetic to sunny and funny. The president aired grievance after grievance before suddenly switching subjects to White House décor.

Weighty topics like Gaza, Ukraine and tariffs came up as Mr. Trump fielded questions, but the primary objective of the portion of the meeting open to reporters appeared to be providing Mr. Trump a chance to express himself.

“It’s hard to have a really successful country if you have a corrupt media,” he said early on.

He was still smarting over reporting by CNN and The New York Times from weeks earlier about a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that deviated from Mr. Trump’s insistence that the strikes he ordered on Iran had “obliterated” that country’s nuclear sites. Mr. Trump singled out segments he had seen on television and one reporter he said ought to be fired.

He was also upset with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for ramping up attacks on Ukraine, defying Mr. Trump’s calls for an end to that war. “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

When a reporter asked who had ordered a pause in weapons shipments to Ukraine — an order that Mr. Trump abruptly reversed on Monday — he replied: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” He refused to elaborate.