In the before times, when a president wanted to make a change at the top of a department, he had a talk with that person or have an intermediary do so and explain it was time for a change. The secretary was allowed to make the decision on their own, even if it was usually known that it wasn’t really their choice. I was thinking about that this week as Pam Bondi’s ouster speedran from hint to certainty in … what? 24 hours? Why doesn’t she just step down on her own, I thought? But I quickly realized why, just on the basis of thinking about the pattern and about Trump. If Trump is getting ready to fire you and you quit, I strongly suspect this would enrage him. He’d see it as a major and perhaps unforgivable act of defiance. Trump gets to fire you. Period. I think he would see anything else the way others might see a subordinate announcing and claiming credit for a project the executive felt he owned.
Trump gets to fire you. Period. It’s a privilege of his power. It’s a benefit of the job. And it’s a reminder, at least this is how I interpret all this, that the firing itself is as much as anything an act of presidential self-soothing, just as launching the war against Iran was. With Kristi Noem and now Bondi canned, I and many others have been waiting for the axe to fall next on Tulsi Gabbard. She is, after all, a woman. Unlike Noem and Bondi she really had very, very little pre-existing relationship with Trump. That’s actually a reason her nomination surprised me from the start. She’s bad. But she’s not really one of his people. Like Bobby Kennedy Jr., he really doesn’t have reason to trust her. The fact that she is wildly unqualified (being in the pocket of a major foreign adversary is usually a deal killer for an intelligence chief) is kind of beside the point. But this article in the Times says that it may be Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
As is always the case with Trump, you have to balance the fact that Chavez-DeRemer almost certainly should be fired (she and her husband respectively have a mix of inappropriate workplace relationships and accusations of sexual assault at the department) with the fact that she’s almost certainly about to be fired because she’s a woman. I mean, are we really saying that Pete Hegseth or Scott Bessent are doing great work? Howard Lutnick? Incompetence and manifest corruption are just the baseline. They can’t be a reason for anyone’s ouster.
