From scapegoats to scandal: How Trump's war on his own Cabinet reveals deeper dysfunction

President Donald Trump’s administration is falling apart, despite America being in the middle of two wars, and this can be explained by one word: Entitlement

“When a group of senior figures in an Administration depart, it’s natural to suspect political dark arts—that one faction has forced the exit of another,” wrote The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Sunday. “But there is no such obvious distinction now: those who have been pushed out and those who so far remain are all hard-line MAGA. Instead, scandals have provided rolling revelations of a general unseriousness.”

Wallace-Wells proceeded to tick off the controversies that have beset some of Trump’s departed Cabinet members. While former Navy Secretary John Phelan is an exception to this rule, having reportedly been fired because of disputes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired for spending more than $200 million on a self-promotional ad campaign; Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired for failing to successfully prosecute Trump’s political enemies; and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned amidst controversy over her allegedly having an affair with a member of her security detail, using government funds for personal travel and drinking on the job. (She contests all of the accusations).

According to Wallace-Wells, these people failed because Trump is not able to hire the best and brightest, but rather loyalists who are willing to go along with his shadier actions. The end result is that the White House rarely delivers the results that it promises, as evidenced by his ongoing Cabinet struggles.

“But what they produced was hype—promises of transformation far too expansive to deliver,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “Musk initially pledged two trillion dollars in savings from doge; when Politico surveyed the effects last August, it found about $1.4 billion in spending cuts, which, though devastating to a number of programs, were less than a tenth of one per cent of the original target. Trump said on the campaign trail that he would deport between fifteen million and twenty million people, and the former Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino told the Times that he’d drawn up plans to deport a hundred million people—which would be nearly a third of the nation’s population.”

He added, “The government actually deported more than six hundred and seventy-five thousand people, but getting just to that number involved broad and violent sweeps and the expulsion of people who were in the country legally, actions that led to widespread protests. On top of that, for all Hegseth’s boasts of ‘maximum lethality’ and the President’s promises of a speedy resolution, the war has been a cascading mess.”

Overall, Wallace-Wells concluded that “the theme of the first Trump Administration was an outsider revolt against the establishment; the theme of the second is its own entitlement. That perhaps explains the sordid atmosphere around the departures and the scandals—the sex, the booze—and also the disinterest in expertise and the corrosive self-certainty. The President got what he most wanted, a White House filled with loyalists. But that has turned out to be not at all what he needed.”

Because Trump’s first three departed Cabinet members were all women, some critics have accused him of sexism in deciding who to fire. Conservative commentator Bill Kristol from The Bulwark made this observation.

"A month ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was the first cabinet official of Trump’s second term to be removed," Kristol wrote. "She had tried dutifully to implement the mass-deportation agenda under the direction of Trump’s top aide, Stephen Miller. But it was Noem, not Miller, who was dumped when Trump needed a scapegoat for its unpopularity."

He added, "Not that one should shed tears for Noem. Nor should one cry for Attorney General Pam Bondi. She too was more than willing and eager to do Trump’s bidding. But Trump judged her to have failed to secure adequate revenge against his enemies. He probably also blamed her for the botched coverup of the Epstein files—even though Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel seemed equally involved in that effort. But it was Bondi who was dumped, not Blanche or Patel. In fact, Blanche is now acting attorney general."