19 October 2026 - 6:30pm
“Women were always going to be the first sacrificial lambs in the Trump 2.0 administration.” So reads the opening salvo of an April essay headlined “Trump’s Disposable Women”, written by a senior writer for The Cut whose beat is apparently “systems of power”. The Guardian ran a similar essay on Saturday titled “All the president’s women: a familiar downward trajectory on Trump’s team”. Even the Daily Mail noted that “half of the eight women originally tapped for top Cabinet and administration positions have vanished from their posts.” Yet this is a trite narrative about the 47th president, and even his biggest detractors should know better.
The Cut reposted its spring article on Instagram over the weekend, adding: “Former White House press secretary Katie Zacharia was fired after a record five days on the job, but she joins the ranks of multiple women Cabinet members the president has fired in his second term.” The article’s accompanying graphic includes Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Susie Wiles, Katie Zacharia, Karoline Leavitt, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Leavitt, however, is still a spokeswoman for Donald Trump — just at his outside super PAC, having left her administration role of her own accord to spend more time with her children. The White House would do anything to have her back, at least according to my sources and Trump’s continuing praise for her.
Gabbard faced scepticism from the moment Trump named her director of national intelligence for ideological reasons, but only left the position this year when her husband faced treatment for a grave form of bone cancer. She was not fired, nor “disposed”, as The Cut implies. Noem, Bondi, and Zacharia were pushed out with cause, so unless The Cut and other outlets are inclined to see them merely as pawns incapable of designing their own demises, the “disposable” explanation makes little sense in their cases either.
Zacharia performed so poorly at her first disastrous briefing and subsequent television appearances that Trump recommended she leave the post, despite the enormous embarrassment to him and his team. She made false claims about being an attorney. She couldn’t get through Hannity. She really had no one but herself to blame, and it would actually have been sexist for Trump to keep her in the role because she was a woman rather than to let her go. Was there a gendered component to the firing of Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted only 10 days as Trump’s communications director in 2017? Sean Spicer spent only six months in the press secretary job before being dismissed.
Finally, Wiles remains the White House Chief of Staff. Having just survived her own cancer battle, she was the subject of speculation last week as Zacharia flailed on the job. The President, reports revealed, made calls inquiring about Wiles’s position. Trump responded to questions about those reports by lavishing Wiles in praise and saying she would “be here for a long time”.
Indeed, Wiles’s case is the best counterpoint to this false narrative, which became a common sentiment during Zacharia’s first and only week as press secretary. Trump went through four chiefs of staff during his first administration and all of them were men. Did we hear about the disposable Reince Priebus or John Kelly or Mick Mulvaney? Even as Wiles battled cancer and Trump’s approval rating dipped, he kept her on staff.
The only Trump departure that possibly fits this narrative of misogynistic firings is that of Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was finally pushed out of her role as ambassador to Greece last week after flamboyant allegations of personal corruption mounted. Guilfoyle is falling on the sword as the President, his sons, his sons-in-law, his commerce secretary, his special envoy to the Middle East, and his ambassador to Turkey engage in glaring conflicts of interests to varying degrees of absurdity. Bad as one case is, a pattern it does not make.
The real story of Trump’s relationship with professional women in his circle is much more interesting than the narrative that he sees them essentially as sex workers — there to look hot, say nice things about him, and move on when that stops working. While he has a long record of disparaging and vulgar remarks about women, he has also repeatedly endowed the likes of Wiles, Noem and Bondi with enormous power and responsibility. The problem for his detractors is that this version of events involves treating Trump’s female hires not as useful idiots, but instead as women with agency who are choosing to make their own decisions that sometimes warrant firing.
