Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Donald Trump has recently rid himself of two Cabinet members who were both, in unsavory ways, a bit larger than life. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made herself the scenery-chewing star of the administration’s mass deportation initiative, lending her department an air of cheesy incompetence even as the conduct of its masked agents became a political handicap for the president and his party. Attorney General Pam Bondi displayed a knack for fumbling major tasks that were highly sensitive politically (e.g., the Epstein Files) or near-and-dear to the Boss’s heart (prosecutions of Trump enemies).
Now a third Cabinet member (and the third woman, as it happens) is hitting the bricks, but this time, it’s over quaint, garden-variety scandals rather than any sort of MAGA drama or policy issue. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned on the heels of serial investigations of wrongdoing and some bad headlines, as the New York Times explained last month:
The agency’s inspector general has opened an inquiry into allegations of professional misconduct by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her closest aides. Investigators have spoken with several dozen witnesses and reviewed evidence and allegations that the secretary used department resources for personal trips, that she was having an affair with a member of her security team and that her aides tried to steer grants to favored political operatives. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been barred from the department’s headquarters, after female staff members accused him of making unwanted sexual advances.
There were also allegations the labor secretary drank on the job and had staff deliver her some adult beverages during official travel. Whether or not all these charges were true, it’s clear Chavez-DeRemer was a walking scandal-magnet. Worse yet, her sins weren’t lurid enough to make her a bad-girl MAGA celebrity. Her lapses in judgment and the bad company she kept could have happened in any administration. In the end, her Cabinet service barely lasted longer than her one term in Congress.
Politically, the appointment of Chavez-DeRemer (who had a mildly pro-labor record in Congress, unusually for a Republican) was thought to be a reward to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who gave Trump’s 2024 campaign some labor street cred by speaking at the Republican national convention and speaking warmly of the once-and-future president. It’s hard to see how O’Brien or any Trump-friendly union folk got much out Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure other than embarrassment.
Specifics aside, it’s hard not to notice that the number of women in Trump’s second Cabinet has dropped from five to two, with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Education Secretary Linda McMahon still around for the time being. It is the kind of gender composition you might expect from a Republican Cabinet of the 1980s, which will probably please the misogynist wing of the MAGA Movement.
