In President Donald Trump’s first term, the revolving door in his cabinet was spinning fast enough to churn butter.
This time around, there have been no major departures or any substantial chatter around replacements so far. “I don’t think anyone is at imminent risk” of losing their job, a former Trump administration official from the first term tells me. “It’s been a much tighter ship, and that’s a result of the fact that, in 2016, they didn’t expect to win.”
There’s still very much a hot seat in Trump 2.0. It just happens to be more evenly shared.
In a highly informal Inner Loop poll of presidential advisers conducted over the past week, I found that there’s a consensus building around which top officials are on the ropes. I asked these sources to rank, in order, the five Cabinet-level officials they thought were in the worst standing with Trump. (“The entire premise of this story is ridiculous—which is to be expected for Wired,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson tells me in a statement. “The President’s entire cabinet is working to flawlessly execute his agenda to Make America Great Again and he is pleased with each of their successes and hard work.”)
At the top of everyone’s lists was either commerce secretary Howard Lutnick or attorney general Pam Bondi. None of these advisers wanted to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, but his ghost kept showing up in their rankings. Both Lutnick and Bondi have made unforced errors involving Trump’s former friend and convicted sex offender, with Lutnick recently going on a lengthy tangent during a New York Post podcast interview about how creeped out he was by Epstein, his one-time neighbor in Manhattan.
Lutnick went into detail about how he almost instantly found Epstein to be “disgusting” and palpably repulsive, to the point that he and his wife quickly left an Epstein home tour that involved a look at a massage table. His comments also earned him a letter from Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who asked Lutnick to come and testify on any firsthand information he has about Epstein.
In July, Bondi opened up the biggest can of worms facing the administration after the Department of Justice and the FBI determined there was no “client list” or evidence Epstein blackmailed wealthy and powerful men. (Lutnick didn’t seem to get the memo. In his podcast appearance, the commerce secretary literally described Epstein as “the greatest blackmailer ever.”)
One Trump adviser would not confirm that their ranking of Bondi stemmed from her handling of the Epstein files. This adviser declined to answer follow-up questions about Bondi because Epstein was not something they were willing to discuss over text. Instead, they replied with the flush-faced emoji (😳) and shared their list:
“Worst, Bondi,” they begin. “2/ Bondi. 3/ Bondi. 4/ Bondi. 5/ HegsethRFKTulsiNoem.”
The bundled choice for number five elucidated something else I’ve been picking up on lately: This time around, the obvious incompetence of many top officials actually works to keep any sustained pressure off of any one cabinet secretary or agency head. It ends up working in everyone’s interest if there are multiple dumpster fires going at once, rather than one big one.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security who oversees ICE—or at least plays the role on TV—has not escaped notice, either. The president’s “biggest vulnerabilities are Lutnick and Noem, followed by RFK,” a senior administration official tells me, without elucidating why.
Under Noem’s tenure running DHS, Trump’s polling numbers on immigration, once one of his strengths, have plummeted, with more than half of those polled saying he has gone too far, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.
Then there’s health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently made an announcement with the president about an unproven link between the active ingredient in Tylenol and autism spectrum disorders. (That’s the one which resulted in the iconic Trump quote, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.”)
Another Trump adviser described the cabinet hot seat as “a constantly moving target,” but they were confident with Lutnick at number one, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at number two.
Gabbard’s good will has ebbed and flowed, a third Trump adviser said. She had been on shakier ground in the early months of the administration, they said, but the president is “over the moon with Tulsi” because of how she’s handled the release of various declassified materials. In several cases, Gabbard has rolled out material that was already in the public domain or not previously digitized. Earlier this year, she released tens of thousands of pages on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Sr., and Martin Luther King Jr. These releases, however, lacked any major revelations, as did her selective declassifications of documents around the origin of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is another internal beneficiary of the discontent and sideshows surrounding other cabinet members. The senior administration official said Hegseth is “fine” as far as his standing with Trump, and the defense secretary didn’t break the top three for anyone else I polled. (Which is fairly impressive, considering his role discussing military operations in Signalgate, where he infamously declared “we are currently clean on OPSEC.”)
At various points through the second Trump administration, other flameouts have provided adequate cover for other top officials who even those in the president’s inner circle have had their doubts about. When the Trump-Elon Musk breakup was happening, the same Trump adviser who listed Bondi four times in a row said there was a sense of surprise, internally, that RFK Jr. managed to outlast Musk.
But despite the low turnover rates, nobody is completely safe, either.
Take treasury secretary Scott Bessent, for example.
The former Trump administration official—who noted Bessent has the best standing of any cabinet official inside the White House—said they’ve heard from multiple people close to the president that Bessent’s reputation for having a temper is something Trump is paying attention to. Bessent had a reported altercation with Musk in mid-April, then made headlines again after former Politico reporter Rachael Bade revealed an early September incident where Bessent reportedly told Bill Pulte, chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that he was going to punch him “in the fucking face.”
“Up to a certain point, that can actually be a positive for the treasury secretary,” the former Trump administration official tells me. “But if it gets to the point where that’s the story, it’s going to be a problem for him … [Trump] doesn’t want somebody’s temper to become the story.”
All of these cabinet officials were chosen for a few reasons, loyalty chief among them. There’s a limited universe of people who are both remotely qualified for these roles and willing to go to the extra—in some cases, extrajudicial—lengths demanded of them.
That, in itself, offers a certain level of job security that simply wasn’t available, or even conceivable, in Trump 1.0.
Maybe why haven’t there been more premature firings is the wrong question going forward. Instead, it might make more sense to look at how much indignity these cabinet officials are willing to tolerate before finally moving on to other opportunities. How many Truth Social posts like the one Trump addressed to Bondi as if it were a DM might await other agency heads, and at what point could enough be enough for someone in this cabinet?
Or, perhaps there is no red line for these folks, and that’s why they’re here.
This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
