What do you get for a president who commands everybody’s attention, all of the time?

For members of President Trump’s cabinet on Tuesday, the answer was apparently this: a televised meeting at the White House that lasted almost half the workday.

In front of a wall of cameras, the old “Apprentice” host offered a clear window into the way he was running his administration, starting with an ego that appeared to need frequent feeding, and blustery stamina: “This has never been done before,” the president said at one point, in between calling on secretaries to speak and marveling over the waiting reporters’ abilities to hold microphones and cameras aloft for several hours.

There in the Cabinet Room — which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office — all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.

That list is as ever-growing as it is specific to Mr. Trump’s pet peeves and political ambitions. It includes preventing “transgender for everybody” in American sports; using a heavy hand — perhaps the death penalty, the president said — to crack down on violent crime; the ongoing threat of windmills; the foul state of traffic medians; the speed with which water flows; and the attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to grow by the day.

Mr. Trump, a pop culture maven, had relatively little to say about what was arguably the biggest news of the day: the engagement of Taylor Swift, whom he has publicly insulted and threatened for not supporting him, to Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. The event rattled on for so long that the president was asked to comment on news that had broken during the meeting.