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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.
The second Trump administration has seen far less churn than the first. That’s in part because, this time around, Trump appointed a slate of hardcore loyalists. Those include Noem and Bondi, who bent over backward to serve the president, even when it meant bending the law, too. And the lack of churn has also been credited to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who by most accounts has enforced significant restraint from a famously chaotic leader. Wiles, though, was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and while she has remained in her role, her influence may not be quite as forceful as it once was.
Trump’s second term has seen a surprising number of women at the highest levels (one-third of Cabinet and Cabinet-level appointees have been women)—still less than the proportion of women in the Cabinets of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and second-term Bill Clinton, but more than Republican presidents before him. Those numbers, though, seem to be quickly declining.
Conservative misogynist men have long made women a deal: Play by our rules (submit to men, don’t challenge their authority, be anti-feminist mouthpieces who are Not Like Other Girls), and we’ll protect you, and might even promote you. No doubt Bondi, Noem, and the other well-behaved women of Trumpworld thought they were holding up their end of the bargain.
But the New Right, of which Trump is the deity-like figurehead—if not exactly a philosophical or intellectual guru—is notoriously sexist, and not in the facially benevolent way of the old Christian right. On the New Right, the ethos of “We need to put women in their place” has taken hold. Women embody empathy, which the right has decided is toxic. Their presence in public life is precisely what has made America un-great. Prominent conservative thinkers, including Scott Yenor at the Heritage Foundation, have suggested that it should be legal to discriminate against women in hiring and pay by allowing employers to only hire male heads of household. White supremacist Nick Fuentes, who enjoys a large following on the right, has argued that, just as “Hitler imprisoned Gypsies [and] Jews … we have to do the same thing with women … they go to the breeding gulags.” The utter woman-hate of his movement was recently captured in a blockbuster New York magazine piece by Sam Adler-Bell, who writes, “a growing group of right-wing women—both prominent personalities and loyal foot soldiers—are waking up to find their inclusion in the MAGA movement was contingent. Sexism wasn’t merely the price of entry; it was the theme of the party.”
No wonder high-ranking women are getting kicked out.
It’s not just Trump’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level female officials who are getting the boot. Defense Department head Hegseth has reportedly blocked promotions for more than a dozen high-ranking Black and female military officers, a move that many see as blatant race and gender discrimination. And according to what three administration officials told the New York Times, an argument broke out in Hegseth’s office after the appointment of Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant to lead the Military District of Washington, a role that includes ceremonial duties like standing with the president at Arlington National Cemetery—because Trump, the Times paraphrased, “would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.” Under Hegseth’s leadership and because of his decision to fire and demote dozens of the military’s highest-ranking women and people of color, nearly all of the military’s top brass are now white men.
Bondi, Noem, and the other women in Trumpworld knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. It is not a secret that this president has asked his attorneys general and other high-ranking officials to break the law and defy the Constitution; it is not a secret that he is quick to anger, and who he fires and retains is often scattershot. Bondi and Noem may be victims of Trumpian sexism, but they’re also villains of their own making. They haven’t exactly earned our sympathy.
Their ouster, though, tells us something important about this president, his administration, and his movement: that conservatism is a trap for women. No matter how hard MAGA women try to please their masters, the ideology is set up to blame women for the problems faced by American men, to demand female subservience, and to scapegoat women when something goes wrong. MAGA rewards women who claim they are Not Like Other Girls—who tote guns like the boys, but always with barrel-curled hair and glossy lips; who might ascend to powerful roles, but are quick to emphasize their most important roles are those of wife and mother. These women are useful cudgels against the feminists who complain about things like gender discrimination or sexism. They have bucked up, buttercup, and look at them now.
Look at them now. Treated, ultimately, like every other girl.
