And Then There Were Three
If Trump ever gets around to start dumping men, will they be replaced by women? Not likely
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And then there were three.
That’s three women still sitting in Donald Trump’s cabinet. Out of 21 cabinet positions, only three women left.
In early March, Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem was given the boot, the first to go. In early April, Attorney General Pam Bondi. In mid-April, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. And now, National Intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard.
And here’s the takeaway: all four have been replaced by men. Three of the replacements have “acting” before their titles and they might carry that caveat for a long time because it means they don’t have to face Senate confirmation. Noem’s successor as DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, is the lone exception. He has been confirmed. It’s rare that a sitting senator fails to be confirmed by his colleagues for a cabinet post. In the past hundred years, it has only happened three times.
Unlike Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, Gabbard leaves with Donald Trump’s high praise. Maybe because she did a great job for him, or maybe just because, as she wrote in a letter to the president, her husband Abraham “has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.” As she explained, “I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”
That sacrifice alone deserves to be applauded.
Realistically though, Gabbard’s head might soon have been on the chopping block anyway. In her fifteen months on the job, she has had slip-up after slip-up. Reportedly, she wasn’t even part of the team brainstorming the invasion of Venezuela and the war against Iran, even though she is the Director of National Intelligence. The New York Times reported yesterday, “She was seldom seen in the room when Mr. Trump made major national-security decisions.”
As for the women still standing, Education Secretary Linda McMahon can’t be long for this world since her mandate when the president appointed her was to eliminate her own department. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has taken a lot of flak for some of her work. The last name on the list, Kelly Loeffler, is administrator of the Small Business Administration, hardly a key cabinet post.
One wonders, when and if Trump ever gets around to start dumping men, will they be replaced by women? Certainly not likely if the president ever tires, for example, of Pete Hegseth. Hegseth already has fired most of the highest ranking women in the department of defense.
Trump never tried to assemble a cabinet that “looked like America.” Now it looks more than ever like the white male-dominated America his rabid right-wing supporters dream about.
So now there are three.