Donald Trump’s Spring Cleaning
In the midst of a war, Donald Trump has started to get rid of his senior officials. The exact reasons are often left vague, and the successors to be determined, but people are leaving. On March 5th, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem; on April 2nd, it was Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, on April 20th, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down under pressure—three Cabinet secretaries, all women, gone in less than two months. By last week, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, seemed to be headed for trouble, too.
The President is also reportedly annoyed with his National Intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and with his Commerce Secretary and friend, Howard Lutnick, about, as Politico put it, “how much Lutnick’s family has been profiting off their association with the President’s brand.” The atmosphere is one of discontent and distraction. A month into the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff, Randy George. Then, after reciting a prayer that Hegseth said was inspired by Scripture but seemed directly lifted from “Pulp Fiction,” last week he ended a vaccine mandate for soldiers—a protocol initiated by General George Washington, in 1777—and fired the Secretary of the Navy, John Phelan, during a naval blockade.
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. 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. Noem was fired after a scorched-earth immigration-enforcement regime had alienated much of the public, and amid reports that she had spent nearly two hundred million dollars of department funds to purchase two luxury jets, and two hundred million to create an ad campaign, largely starring herself. Chavez-DeRemer is the subject of an internal investigation based on a whistle-blower complaint accusing her of having an affair with a member of her security detail, of using government funds for personal travel, and of drinking on the job; her husband was banned from department headquarters following allegations of sexual misconduct toward staffers, which he has denied. (A lawyer representing Chavez-DeRemer said that she disputed all of the allegations, and no charges have been filed against her husband.) Patel, who earlier this year was found to have assigned F.B.I. officers to protect his girlfriend, a country singer, last week sued The Atlantic for defamation after it reported that his security detail has often had trouble rousing him for work following nights out drinking, and on one occasion called for “breaching equipment” to break down a door and wake him.
That these staffing changes and scandals involve figures from such disparate parts of the Administration, and are coming just months ahead of the midterm elections, suggests a more generalized crisis. Sixty-seven per cent of Americans disapprove of the job that Trump is doing, according to an A.P.-NORC poll published last week, and part of the story of both his plummeting numbers and the chaos in the Administration is the ongoing crisis of conservative expertise. Trump’s first term was marked—and, in the view of those closest to him, limited—by its dependence on Administration officials who were, at best, skeptical of his aims. This time around, Trump has gone for loyalty. Bondi, for instance, was very willing to carry out his imperative to punish civil servants who had helped President Biden to “weaponize” the government against him; the problem was that she couldn’t make it happen. “Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Chad Mizelle, who was Bondi’s chief of staff, told CNN recently. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”
It appears that the whole government is now being run by a very small group of people. When Trump swept back into office, the sense of right-wing momentum hinged on two sources of strength: the dedication of the conservative lawyers behind Project 2025, who seemed to have planned out in exhilarating detail the transformation of a liberal state into a Trumpist one, and the commitment of a cadre of Silicon Valley investors and executives surrounding Elon Musk, who, even if they didn’t know much (or anything) about government, had theories about how to deliver dramatic organizational change.
But what they produced was hype—promises of transformation far too expansive to deliver. 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. 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.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Administration is paying out refunds for tariffs that it could not convince even a very friendly Supreme Court it had the legal authority to enforce, and has spent much of the past year entangled in revelations from the Jeffrey Epstein case, the political consequences of which were another reason, apparently, that Trump turned on Bondi. Contained within all these fiascoes is a subtly different conservative movement. 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. ♦