But the president has often pointed to his hiring and promoting of women in an attempt to stave off criticism of both his policies and personal conduct over the years. During his second term, however, there is one common characteristic among most of those who have departed the Trump administration. In the space of just a few months, half of his eight female cabinet officials have either resigned or been fired.
All have been replaced by men. Several other women in his administration have also departed, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. On Friday, Trump was forced to deny reports that he was considering replacing Susie Wiles, his White House chief of staff, and the first woman to do the job.
Numerous top male officials, meanwhile, from Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who has on multiple occasions courted global condemnation, to the widely ridiculed FBI director Kash Patel, have survived intense scrutiny and repeated calls for their resignation – and yet remain in post. The latest female casualty was White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, who was fired on Friday just five days into the role. After a rocky start to her tenure, sparked by a widely panned first White House press briefing on Tuesday, she had also faced questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
The ensuing semantics battle over whether or not she is a lawyer, or an attorney, placed her in a pickle – even with the rightwing cable network Fox News. Zacharia had taken over from Karoline Leavitt, who said in August that she had chosen to resign from the role after 20 months so she could spend more time with her young family. In terms of firings, the first domino to fall was former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, who was the face of Trump’s mass deportation campaign until she was unceremoniously sacked on 5 March.
Her tenure was plagued by controversy, in large part amid national uproar over federal immigration enforcement operations that killed two US citizens in Minneapolis (one of whom Noem called a “domestic terrorist”, with no evidence), and coincided with a sharp decline in national support for Trump’s immigration agenda. Her suggestion at a congressional hearing in March that Trump had known about her decision to approve a contract for a $220m ad campaign to encourage immigrants to “self-deport” – which prominently featured Noem on horseback – reportedly left Trump “pissed” and appeared to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. There had also been scrutiny of general leadership failures under Noem, as well as questions the influence of her adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who also left his role when she was ousted.
Noem was repurposed as special envoy to the so-called “Shield of the Americas” coalition and, after that arrangement expired last month, is now serving in a vaguely defined advisory role. She was succeeded as DHS secretary by Markwayne Mullin. Next fell former attorney general and Trump loyalist Pam Bondi, who was pushed out in April after a turbulent 14 months that saw the president increasingly frustrated over her mishandling of the Department of Justice’s long-awaited release of the Epstein files.
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