You're Fired
Trump's Cabinet Reality Show Gets Ugly.
Thanks to Ground News for making this post free for all readers.
For a full year, Donald Trump did something he never managed in his first term: he refused to fire anyone. Not because the people he’d appointed were competent, Lord, no, but because of a single, shimmering reason. He didn’t want the media to “get a win.” Any firing, any resignation, any pink slip would be written up as chaos, as proof the “best people” were actually the worst people, as vindication for every critic who’d warned that stacking the executive branch with TV hosts, bootlickers, taint polishers, podcast bros, and vengeance-driven flunkies was a bad idea.
So Trump sat on his hands. Cabinet members kept their jobs through scandals that would have ended careers in any previous administration. That era is over.
In the past six weeks, Trump has ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and, just yesterday, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. The Atlantic reports FBI Director Kash “Poodle” Patel is, per a former White House official, “rightly paranoid” he’s next. The Guardian says Trump has been polling aides about whether to can DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
Firing season is here.
Here is the fundamental problem, and it is one Trump will never solve because it is downstream of who he is: he picks people for loyalty, and loyalty in his world is inversely correlated with competence.
The kind of person who will say “yes, sir” to anything is, almost by definition, not the kind of person who can actually do a cabinet-level job. You cannot prosecute complex federal cases, run a 3-million-person military, manage a 22-agency national security apparatus, or direct the FBI on trolling, Truth Social posts, and asskissing.
And here’s the really incredible part: even the ones who have tried to do evil on Trump’s behalf aren’t even very good at that.
Pam Bondi was handed a blank check to indict Trump’s enemies. Comey, Jim Letitia James, Adam Schiff, a deluxe hit list of people who tried to hold Trump to account, anywhere, ever.
The result? Grand juries refused to indict. Judges threw cases out. A federal judge ruled Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan was invalidly appointed. Bondi left office with a perfect zero on political prosecutions. Now Jeanine Franzia Pirro, angling for Bondi’s old job, is running the DC US Attorney’s office into the ground; her win rate in federal trials this year is roughly 50%, versus a 90% national average, and near 0% of the political cases Trump values most.
DC juries, having watched the Trump banners go up over the Justice Department and the Labor Department, have concluded what anyone with eyes has concluded, and they are voting accordingly. Todd Blanche, currently serving as acting AG, will inherit this exact same problem. You cannot prosecute political enemies on manufactured charges in a courthouse where the jury pool thinks you’re a liar. It doesn’t matter how many giant Trump portraits you hang off the building. It may, in fact, make things worse.
Then there’s Epstein. Bondi, Blanche, and Patel were supposed to run the cover-up.
Instead they turned it into a slow-motion catastrophe: the infamous “it’s on my desk” remark, the binders full of nothing handed to MAGA influencers on a White House photo op, the forced release of millions of pages under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the watchdog complaints about missing communications from Bondi, Blanche, and Patel themselves.
Ro Khanna read names feom the House floor. Jamie Raskin told Bondi that Trump’s name appears “more than a million times” in the unredacted files. Bondi was subpoenaed by House Oversight on April 12 and simply didn’t show up. The cover-up is the scandal now. They failed at the one job that mattered most to Trump personally. It makes Watergate look like a Chuck-E-Cheese playdate.
Pete Hegseth is, by any measure, a catastrophe at Defense. Signalgate, the Yemen strike plans shared in a group chat that accidentally included the editor of The Atlantic, was only the beginning.
He purged the JAG Corps of independent military lawyers and installed his personal attorney to run what’s left of it. He gutted the Pentagon’s weapons-testing watchdog by 75%. His broker was shopping defense-industry ETFs for him the week he was ordering strikes on Iran, per the Financial Times. Thirteen American servicemembers are dead in an Iran war that has no clear objective. House Democrats filed six articles of impeachment against him on April 15. He is quoting Pulp Fiction at Pentagon prayer services. This is our Secretary of Defense during an active war. It’s not a good look, and SECDUNK’s culture-war raging isn’t helping.
But the dam didn’t break on any of that. The dam broke on Kristi Noem. On the $220 million taxpayer-funded vanity ad campaign, where she rode a rental horse in front of Mount Rushmore with $4,000 of hair and makeup (the horse itself cost $20,000, because of course it did). On the widely reported affair with Corey Lewandowski, she refused to explicitly deny under oath.
And on the Daily Mail‘s exposé of her husband Bryon’s secret um sissy bimbofication online life; the hot pink hot pants, the balloon-stuffed crop tops, the tens of thousands of dollars in PayPal transfers to adult performers, all while his wife was running the Department of Homeland Security. It was so lurid, so stupid, so impossible to spin, that even Trump had to cut her loose. The “tough cowgirl defending the homeland” brand died in a puddle of skin-toned spandex.
Once Noem fell, the spell broke. Bondi went three weeks later. Chavez-DeRemer went yesterday, an affair with her security guard, drinking on the job, and four other Labor officials have already been forced out.
Patel is next. He knows it.
I wrote about the Atlantic’s amazing coverage in The Drunk In The Poodle Room, and the story of his freak-outs over computer glitches he misread as a termination notice sticks with me. That’s the deep Trump trauma; always paranoid, never effective.
He’s suing The Atlantic for $250 million over reporting on his drinking and unexplained absences, and it will go absolutely nowhere. Dick Durbin is on the Senate floor calling him a national security risk.
And Gabbard is hanging on by a thread; Trump is openly furious she “shielded” Joe Kent, the counterterrorism chief who resigned denouncing the Iran war as a favor to Israel. Her own spokesperson is reduced to pointing out that Trump said nice things about her three days ago, which, as everyone now knows, is exactly what Trump said about Bondi the week before he fired her.
A word from our sponsor, Ground News.
Look, you know the drill. Whether you’re watching a “show” or a “tell” depends entirely on which outlet is feeding you these firings. Fire up cable news right now and the Chavez-DeRemer ouster is either “routine cabinet transition” or “the fourth forced departure in six weeks.” Same firing. Same week. Two different Americas. I’ve been getting around that problem the same way for months now: Ground News. It’s the app I actually use, every day, to see which stories my own side is downplaying and which ones the other side is pretending didn’t happen.
Their Bias Comparison feature is built for exactly this moment. It pulls headlines on a single story from left, center, and right outlets and lines them up next to each other on one screen — each source tagged with its political lean, ownership, and factuality rating right there in the margin.
Bias Comparison on the Noem ouster — left, center, and right headlines side by side, with lean and factuality on each.
When Noem got cut, Bias Comparison let you watch the right-leaning press soft-pedal it as a graceful exit to “spend more time in South Dakota” while the center and the left led with the horse, the Lewandowski affair, and the Bryon Noem bimbofication kerfluffle. When Hegseth leaked Yemen strike plans into a group chat, one side called it a “mishap” and the other called it a national-security disaster.
Bias Comparison Summary on Signalgate — the same event, three different framings.
Bias Comparison puts both framings on the same page — so you stop having to guess which side is running the show and which side is running the tell. At a glance, you can see the bias bar for any story across the whole cabinet collapse:
Feed view — the bias bar on every cabinet firing, at a glance.
Against All Enemies readers get 40% off the Vantage Plan — the full unlimited tier with publisher-ownership data, blindspot alerts, and the whole kit — at ground.news/rick. QR code below for easy scanning. Fire it up before the next cabinet member gets fired. You’ll need it.
It’s not as if they didn’t have a warning.
Everything Trump Touches Dies. Always. Forever. ETTD is not a slogan; it is a law of political physics, and it applies to Trump himself most of all.
In 2017, America watched Trump fire people and saw reality TV. “You’re fired” was branding. It was the show. It played as strength, as decisiveness, as the boss finally cleaning house.
In 2026, America is watching Trump fire people and seeing something very different. His approval is in the political Marianas Trench, it’s so far underwater. The midterms are seven months away. Republicans are whispering about a wipeout. And the man who built his brand on never showing weakness is now panic-firing the very people he told us, fourteen months ago, were the greatest collection of talent ever assembled in Washington.
It’s not a show anymore. It’s a tell.
Trump’s cabinet is now know known as the “liquor cabinet.” I’d hate to see Kash Patel in delirium tremens but firing Patel would break Trump’s misogyny streak at the very least.
This: "The kind of person who will say “yes, sir” to anything is, almost by definition, not the kind of person who can actually do a cabinet-level job."