<
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/04/trump-pam-bondi-fired-kristi-noem-pete-hegseth.html>
"Pam Bondi is out as attorney general, the latest in a line of high-profile
Trump administration women to be sacked in recent weeks. Homeland Security
Secretary Kristi Noem was fired in early March. Centers for Disease Control
Director Susan Monarez was fired in August, even though she had only been
confirmed a few weeks earlier. National Intelligence head Tulsi Gabbard is
still in her role, but the president has reportedly been polling other Cabinet
members on whether he should oust her. And earlier this week, President Donald
Trump told press secretary Karoline Leavitt that she was “doing a terrible
job,” blaming her for the “93 percent bad publicity” his administration has
received. Leavitt, who is pregnant, is set to take leave beginning in May.
Trump-watchers are wondering if she’ll last that long.
For a Cabinet that was largely male and almost entirely white to begin with,
it’s … interesting to see the women get picked off one by one. When Trump casts
around for someone to blame, there’s a clear pattern to who he zeroes in on.
Trump has pushed out men, too—but for the most part only after spectacular
screw-ups (and even then, some of the biggest screw-ups remain in their roles).
And these men were largely not actually given the public axe, and not made to
endure the resulting public humiliation. Former Border Patrol head Greg Bovino
oversaw a disastrous Immigration and Customs Enforcement incursion into
Minnesota that led to the public killings of two U.S. citizens, sparking mass
protests. Even after all of that, he was simply moved back to his previous role
in California and allowed to quietly retire. National Security adviser Mike
Waltz accidentally added the editor in chief of the
Atlantic to a private
Signal chat about bombing Yemen; he was removed from his national security
post, but made ambassador to the United Nations.
Other men who have made colossal errors have retained their posts. Pete Hegseth
is the one who decided to send war plans and other sensitive classified
information to his colleagues, his wife, and his brother on Signal in the first
place, and he remains in charge of the Department of Defense (and continues to
insist on calling it, ridiculously, the Department of War). Stephen Miller is
one of the administration’s most odious members and a near-constant source of
public embarrassment; he was also, by most accounts, the one actually pulling
the strings at Noem’s Department of Homeland Security and setting the
administration’s immigration policies, including spreading the lie that Alex
Pretti, the U.S. citizen who was gunned down in the street by ICE agents, was
an “assassin” planning a “massacre.”
And if Miller is the administration’s most odious, FBI Director Kash Patel is
its most buffoonish. He has raced to social media to announce the capture of
suspects in two high-profile shootings—that of Charlie Kirk and that at Brown
University—before any suspect was actually apprehended. Iranian intelligence
has gotten into his Gmail—where he had forwarded emails from his Justice
Department account. He took an FBI jet to Italy so he could party with the
American hockey team at the Olympics, all with the U.S. taxpayer footing the
bill. He has instructed SWAT teams to accompany his 27-year-old country-singer
girlfriend (he’s 46) to hair appointments.
Any one of these stories would have been a career-ender in previous
administrations."
Via Birne Helene.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
