Trump admin flailing as four cabinet members buckle under pressure

U.S. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., attend a cabinet meeting at the White House (Reuters)

Donald Trump has made political human shields of the officials close to him, using them to absorb the brunt of the anger generated by his leadership. However, according to a new analysis from the New York Times, all of these shields appear "to be faltering at once."

The Times opinion columnist Carl Lozada wrote the analysis, which was published on Friday, likening these figures within Trump's administration to shields deployed to protect ships in Star Trek. He also laid out the four individuals in question, who have been absorbing "the blowback from [Trump's] most contentious policies," but might not be for much longer.

"Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, is a shield for the Trump administration’s brutal, sometimes fatal, immigration enforcement," Lozada explained. "Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is the face of the president’s efforts to exact prosecutorial vengeance upon his antagonists and to bypass such punishment for his allies. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, embodies the administration’s crusade against diversity programs and its faux tough-guy persona. And Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, is the administration’s 'tariff dealmaker in chief,' as The New Yorker put it, the implementer of the president’s stubbornly unpopular trade policies."

Each of these cabinet members, Lozada argued, has shown signs of buckling under the pressure of taking political fire for Trump, threatening to open him up to direct accountability. Noem, he noted, has weathered embarrassing reports about her obsession with TV appearances and lies about an alleged "cannibal" immigrant, in addition to being one of the faces of Trump's increasingly despised deportation agenda. Reports have also circulated suggesting that she might be considering a Senate run to avoid impeachment.

Bondi, meanwhile, has weathered intense scrutiny over her department's handling of the Epstein files and the failure to properly redact victim information. She has also been dogged by reports that her department is struggling to hire enough lawyers to handle its case loads.

Hegseth, Lozada suggested, was damaged from the start by allegations of sexual assault and alcoholism during his confirmation process, and things have not gotten better for him as he led the campaign to bomb boats in the Caribbean Sea under thin pretenses and picked a fight with Democratic lawmakers for reminding soldiers they do not have to follow illegal orders.

"And Lutnick, already charged with pursuing the Trump administration’s tariff policy — which 60 percent of Americans dislike — is now known to have misled the public about his connections to Epstein, which were more extensive than the secretary had previously stated," Lozada wrote.

All of these scandals and screw-ups might have been enough for Trump to fire them during his first term, but during his second, the president has seemed much less interested in cutting anybody, for any reason. Lozada reasoned that, in the case of these four particular cabinet members, Trump has kept them around because, despite the public outcry against them, they have only ever been carrying out his will exactly.

"The offenses of Trump’s second-term cabinet members tend to be ones of loyalty or sycophancy, rarely of independent thought," Lozada explained. "Whatever damage the secretaries inflict on their country or their reputations is done on the president’s orders and on his behalf."

He also argued that, since his own political career will largely be over once he leaves office, Trump is probably not concerned about whatever public blowback he might be getting hit with.

"For all the attention devoted to Trump’s deteriorating popularity, his public standing may not matter that much to him," Lozada concluded. "Trump knows he is not going to appear on a ballot again; whatever the price for the incompetence of his cabinet or the venality of his administration, he will not be the one to pay it."

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