Three cabinet secretaries gone in four weeks. For Donald Trump, the purge has begun.
On Monday afternoon, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was the latest to be shown the door. The White House announced the embattled cabinet member would leave the administration effective immediately, with Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling named as acting secretary. It comes less than a month after Kristi Noem ended her tenure as secretary of Homeland Security and weeks after Trump pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Shortly before news of her departure broke, Chavez-DeRemer — whose time at the Labor Department was mired in controversy — was summoned to the White House, a source familiar with the matter told MS NOW.
There, the cabinet secretary was given an ultimatum: Resign or be fired, a White House official told MS NOW. She took the first option, putting a bookend on a tumultuous tenure marked by investigations of misconduct and allegations of a toxic workplace.
Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation, notably, came days before she was scheduled to sit for an interview with the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General, one of the sources said. The department’s watchdog launched an investigation earlier this year over allegations of misconduct involving the secretary and senior staff.
Each of the three cabinet officials had specific vulnerabilities that, despite their deep loyalty to the president, made them liabilities. Chavez-DeRemer was embroiled in a series of scandals over allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate and the conduct of her husband, who was accused of sexual misconduct involving two female Labor Department employees. Through her attorney, Chavez-DeRemer has denied any wrongdoing.
Noem’s leadership of the president’s immigration crackdown came under mounting congressional scrutiny after the killing of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minnesota, but the president didn’t fire her over the harsh tactics she deployed as secretary. Ultimately, it was her testimony before lawmakers that Trump had signed off on a $220 million DHS advertising campaign prominently featuring herself — a claim the White House denied — that resulted in her ouster. And Trump had grown frustrated over Bondi’s failure to adequately prosecute his perceived political enemies and her general handling of the Epstein files.
But those specifics elide the most pressing reason for the ousters: Trump is in political trouble, and the cabinet is paying the price.
“In this White House, when it rains it pours,” a former Trump White House official told MS NOW. A cabinet shakeup is “to be expected,” they said.
The firings are not, at their core, a personnel story; they are a signal of a White House under strain. When a president cannot change his circumstances, he changes his staff.
The political context is not hard to read. The war in Iran, almost two months in, is not going the way Trump said it would. His approval rating is in the mid-to-high 30s. Gas prices average more than $4 a gallon nationally; 68% of Americans disapprove of his handling of inflation in the latest NBC News Decision Desk poll.
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Taken together, the picture is of a president whose second term is not unfolding how he’d hoped.
On Monday alone, Trump posted at least four times about how much he was “winning” in his war against Iran, blaming Democrats, the press and “rigged” polling for bad headlines as Republicans increasingly worry that they will face major losses in November.
In recent weeks, as Trump’s polling has fallen to new depths in response to the war with Iran and resultant spike in gas prices, allies close to the president and aides in the White House have tried to focus the president’s messaging to little, if any, success.
The White House did not respond to questions about Chavez-DeRemer’s ouster, instead pointing to X posts from spokesperson Steven Cheung and the former secretary herself.
Chavez-DeRemer did not acknowledge the multiple allegations against her and her husband, nor the internal watchdog investigation into her conduct. “I am looking forward to what the future has in store as I depart for the private sector,” she said on X.
Chavez-DeRemer’s lawyer, Nick Oberheiden, said she “did not resign due to findings that she violated the law,” claiming “her decision to leave office was personal.”
Each cabinet ousting creates a new problem: Someone has to replace them. Those newcomers will inherit the same political environment and demands. And they will serve, like everyone before them, at the pleasure of a president who, when the walls close in, starts looking for someone else to blame.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.
Laura Barrón-López covers the White House for MS NOW.
Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.