Back when Donald Trump was just a New York tabloid fixture and reality show host, his signature tag line was typically rude and nasty: “You’re fired!” During his first campaign, he loved to yell it out on stage at his rallies with a snarling expression, which made the crowds go wild. Even when he ascended to the White House, he deployed the expression liberally, often aiming it at his staff and Cabinet members. His administration was known for its massive turnover, breaking records for a president’s first term.
According to a Brookings Institute study, when he left office in 2021, Trump’s “A Team” turnover was 92%, a figure that did not include Cabinet secretaries. Even more startling was the turnover there. Most members of his Cabinet were forced out under pressure — fired, in other words — or else they resigned in protest. A similar analysis by the New York Times found that of 21 top White House and Cabinet positions going back to 1992, “nine had turned over at least once during the Trump administration, compared with three at the same point of the Clinton administration, two under President Barack Obama and one under President George W. Bush.”
As it happens, Trump is known to be a coward when it comes to bringing the hammer down himself, so he often tasks others to do his dirty work. The most famous example of this involves Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, who learned he was fired by a presidential tweet in the middle of a trip to Africa. The story goes that when Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called Tillerson to warn the tweet was coming, the secretary was on the john.
Incidents like this were commonplace during the president’s first term, and now, with a series of three Cabinet firings or forced resignations in six weeks — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5, Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2 and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on April 20 — it appears he may be returning to his old ways.
Trump entered office in 2017 unschooled in the ways of Washington, and he knew nothing about how the presidency worked. He expected that members of his staff and Cabinet would be as fawning and obsequious as his employees at the Trump Organization. Instead he found they considered themselves professionals, with a responsibility to give the president their best advice. He soon disabused them of such a notion.
This is not to say that there weren’t some people who deserved to be fired. Trump’s first national security adviser, Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, was found to be chatting with the Russian ambassador on a back channel during the transition, and then lied about it to the FBI. But Trump has harbored regrets about firing Flynn, so much that he recently signed off on a Justice Department settlement of over a million dollars to compensate the former adviser for his trouble — even though he had pleaded guilty and was let off the hook with a presidential pardon. Flynn has stayed loyal to Trump, and the president is rewarding him handsomely.
Then there were people like Tom Price, Trump’s first secretary of health and human services. He was forced to resign because he was traveling around on private jets at taxpayer expense, which seems like a joke today. (Who in the second Trump administration isn’t doing that? Trump himself has accepted a luxury 747 as a gift from a foreign country.) There were alleged domestic abusers forced to resign, and lawyers, ethics advisers and other staffers who disagreed on policy, many of whom Trump just decided he didn’t like. They left under a cloud — each one a scandal for at least one news cycle.
The main lesson Trump appears to have taken from his first term was to only hire staff who would never dare to cross him or tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. All you have to do is witness the displays of sycophancy by his appointees during his televised Cabinet meetings to understand the dynamics within his second administration. And until recently, Trump has refused to fire any of them — no matter what they’ve done.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was caught red-handed divulging sensitive information on an unsecured phone app — he even put a very critical journalist on the thread by mistake — and all Trump did as punishment was demote the national security adviser to United Nations ambassador. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remains in his job, despite presiding over a record measles outbreak, and being a daily embarrassment and ongoing threat to the health of the nation. FBI Director Kash Patel has bungle high-profile investigations and recently filed suit against the Atlantic for reporting there have been “episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s conflicts of interest and ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, might have caused him to be fired by any other president. But his fidelity to Trump is second to none, and he remains in his job.
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But something has changed in recent weeks. Noem, who presided over the president’s unpopular mass deportation policy, was forced out amid allegations of grifting, self-dealing and carrying on an affair with her top lieutenant Corey Lewandowski. Bondi was fired for botching the Epstein files and failing to effectively prosecute the people on Trump’s lengthy enemies list. And on Monday, Chavez-DeRemer reportedly resigned due to charges of abuse of power, drinking on the job and sexual misconduct charges involving her father and her husband
As the president’s approval ratings have plunged into the low to mid-30s amid rising inflation, the spectacle of his immigration policy and his inexplicable decision to go to war with Iran, Trump appears to be looking for scapegoats — and ways to distract the media and the public. It’s a mark of a presidency on the brink, teetering due to a chaotic and vacillating policy agenda, poor management and outright incompetence.
And if rumors are to be believed, more firings could be in the offing.
The prediction markets have Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the top of the list. She’s working overtime to appease Trump by apparently spending her time creating “evidence” that the Russia investigation, his first impeachment and the 2020 election were all Democratic Party/Deep State conspiracies. Trump needs that to soothe him as he faces even more exposure as a failure in this second term. Whether it will be enough to spare her is an open question. She is, after all, a woman — just like Chavez-DeRemer, Bondi and Noem.
Whatever the case, more scapegoats are almost certainly on the way. If there’s one thing we know about Trump, it’s that he will never blame himself.
Salon