Which Trumpies’ Heads Will Roll Next?

Donald Trump first came to Americans’ attention more than 20 years ago for gleefully firing all manner of people on his show The Apprentice. Today, even as every poll indicates that if there’s one person Americans most want fired, it’s Trump himself, Trump’s own orgy of discharges continues apace. In the past week, both our ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Trump’s blink-and-you-miss-her press secretary, Katie Zacharia, have been exited out. (Enterprising news producers might want to accompany the story of Zacharia’s in-and-out tenure with clips of Groucho Marx’s entrance song in Animal Crackers: “Hello, I Must Be Going.”)

The well-earned departure of these two Trump loyalists has also prompted stories on Trump’s proclivity for firing his female appointees when he thinks they’ve betrayed him or otherwise let him down, while leaving in place his even more dubious male appointees. His refusal to sack his fellow billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after news broke that he’d visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, and FBI chief Kash Patel in the wake of allegations that he’d been drinking heavily and using a government plane for private travel, appears to illustrate the power of male bonding, even as his firing of four female cabinet secretaries (Pam Bondi at Justice, Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, Lori Chavez-DeRemer at Labor, and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence) reveals no such reticence.

By coincidence, the spate of stories on the female heads that have rolled are appearing just as another set of stories are popping up that focus on which Trump appointees will be shown the door in the wake of what looks to be a disastrous midterm election. The figure most discussed in these stories is White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. The Washington Post reported that the fact Trump had not consulted her when he went ahead and made Zacharia his short-lived press secretary signaled to longtime Trumpians that she was now out of his loop (though an unbiased observer might conclude that the party at fault in the Zacharia debacle wasn’t Wiles, but Trump). Among those whom Trump’s mentioners are mentioning to become Wiles’s replacement are Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Bill Pulte, who’s made a name for himself by falsely accusing public figures on Trump’s hit list—New York Attorney General Letitia James, California Sen. Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook—of mortgage fraud.

Historically, presidents whose party gets shellacked in midterm elections identify and dispose of underlings who are at least in part responsible for those shellackings. In 2006, President George W. Bush discharged his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as it had become clear to one and all that the U.S. Army forces that had invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein under Rumsfeld’s leadership had no plans for how to deal with that country’s near civil war, which was costing many American lives. The invasion, of course, had been a pet project of Bush’s, for which no plausible justification has ever been adduced, but Bush wasn’t about to sack himself.

A similar logic might lead Trump to sack his own defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who oversees the armed forces now getting shelled, drone-bombed, or threatened long-distance by Iran—leading to panicked retreats in locations as far afield as Britain—with no prospect of either going in or getting out. As with W’s Saddam fixation, our current war on Iran is entirely the result of Trump’s foolishness and indifference to empirical evidence, two of his north stars as he’s steered our nation into yet another bottomless military morass. As Hegseth is directly linked to Trump’s most politically damaging initiative, just as Rumsfeld was to W’s, you might think that would constitute normal grounds for sacrificing him to the gods of public fed-up-ness. That last week’s Gallup poll showed that Americans favored the Democrats over the Republicans not just on economic stewardship but also on protecting the nation from foreign terrorists suggests that our Iranian adventure is at the center of our trans-partisan discontent.

Then again, Hegseth also personifies the administration’s pitch to the beleaguered young men who feel compelled to fight off economic redundancy by immersion in the presumed comforts of hypermasculinity, from bodybuilding to MMA. It’s those young men that Elon Musk’s precinct walkers are seeking to turn out at the polls right now, even though Trump’s economy has knocked them sideways. Hegseth’s since-revoked order for livestreaming a firing-squad execution surely appealed to the young brownshirts in our midst; in that sense, he more directly appeals to a core Trump constituency—for instance, the January 6th insurrectionists—than any other member of the administration. Maybe he’ll survive. (If he doesn’t, I’d imagine that America’s generals and admirals would be thrilled to see a livestreaming of his firing.)

But if Trump is truly concerned about dumping an official whose tenure in office has dragged down his approval rating, he would turn to the guy who’s instead being mentioned as Wiles’s successor: consigliere Stephen Miller. Of all the issues on which Trump was re-elected in 2024, his vow to enforce America’s immigration laws so that undocumented immigrants would no longer flock across our borders was among the most popular, and a key to Trump’s victory. Today, Trump’s approval rating on immigration issues is a bare 37 percent, according to the Harvard Kennedy School’s polling. It’s not the border enforcement that Americans object to; it’s the rampage of ICE and Border Patrol agents that has broken families, shattered communities, and wantonly killed immigrants and citizens alike. All of these, of course, are Stephen Miller’s handiwork, and the fear, revulsion, and rage it has brought to Latino communities in particular has, according to the polls, so reversed the flow of Latino voters into the Republican column that they will cost the party numerous House seats next month, and most likely some Senate seats as well. Considered solely as a political strategist, Miller has been a pro bono boon to the Democrats, even though, when considered as a human being, Miller is the closest thing to Trump’s Himmler.

But dump Stephen Miller? No one else can translate Trump’s rages into barbaric state-sponsored pogroms like Stevie. Come the post-midterm reckoning, he’ll probably be safe. Would the same could be said of the rest of us.