Consider this question posed by Vanity Fair: What will Trump do when he runs out of women to fire?
On Friday, President Trump announced that he would replace his White House chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller, the hardline deputy chief of staff behind Trump’s immigration policy and more.
Wiles’ ouster came after the Republicans’ major losses in the midterms. Trump initially responded to the election’s results with the rationalization that he wasn’t, personally, on the ballot. But the New York Times reports that on election night, he blamed Wiles for the party’s losses in front of other people.
Wiles joins a now-long list of women who were hired and fired (or forced out) by the second Trump administration: Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Tulsi Gabbard. There’s the exit of press secretary Karoline Leavitt—who reportedly resigned after Trump wouldn’t stop calling her on maternity leave—and the weeklong tenure of her successor Katie Zacharia. Don’t forget Kimberly Guilfoyle’s firing as ambassador to Greece, announced on live TV.
There were reasons, or scandals, behind most of these departures. Noem was ousted amid intense scrutiny over ICE’s operations, especially in Minnesota. Bondi, the attorney general, was caught up in uproar over the Epstein files. Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary, was investigated for misconduct, including reports of improper spending and that her husband was accused of making unwanted sexual advances to female Labor Department staff. (A lawyer for Chavez-DeRemer has said she did not violate the law.) Gabbard, the national security advisor, resigned amid the war in Iran and after her husband was diagnosed with cancer.
But men in the Trump cabinet like Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have a list of scandals that’s equally long or longer—and there they remain.
At one point last year, Trump boasted that his administration had “more women in our cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.”
Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, an academic studying governance, told the New York Times last month: “I’ve never seen a situation where all of the first set of cabinet departures have been of one gender—all women.”
Wiles was a key architect of Trump’s return to power. She was the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff and, for a while, was a kind of Trump whisperer. But CNN reports that she decided to resign after seeing the president lose confidence in her. She “[believed] he should be able to tap someone to lead his White House that had his confidence,” CNN reported. She had previously said she would stay on through the end of the term, but has been dealt other blows this year, including a battle with breast cancer.
The women remaining at the top of the Trump administration are Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration; Secretary of Education Linda McMahon; and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. Replacements for Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Noem were all white men.
The MAGA movement welcomes women to join—but when push comes to shove, the default seems to be protecting its own.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.
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PARTING WORDS
"Women are tremendous economic drivers in this economy, and we still aren’t making art for them."
—The Gilded Age star Carrie Coon

