{"id":8631,"date":"2025-12-26T13:55:52","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T13:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/12\/26\/loyalty-over-all-trump-was-once-known-for-constantly-switching-out-his-staff-not-anymore-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T13:55:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T13:55:52","slug":"loyalty-over-all-trump-was-once-known-for-constantly-switching-out-his-staff-not-anymore-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/12\/26\/loyalty-over-all-trump-was-once-known-for-constantly-switching-out-his-staff-not-anymore-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Loyalty over all\u2019: Trump was once known for constantly switching out his staff. Not anymore – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"
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F<\/span>or more than a decade he built his brand on two words: \u201cYou\u2019re fired!\u201d And in his first term in the White House, Donald Trump<\/a> did not hesitate to show his staff the door, often via an abrasive tweet.<\/p>\n

But since resuming the US presidency in January, Trump, the former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice<\/a>, appears to have become an uncharacteristically bashful boss, more disposed to hiring than firing.<\/p>\n

Whereas his first term was marked by chaos \u2013 his first 14 months saw the highest cabinet turnover<\/a> of any president for a century \u2013 his second has been comparatively stable, with a team remaining almost entirely intact.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think my cabinet is fantastic,\u201d Trump said recently, dismissing reports of dissatisfaction with his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, or his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. \u201cI read these same stories that I\u2019m unhappy with this one or that one \u2013 and I\u2019m not. I think the cabinet has done a great job \u2026 We have just a fantastic cabinet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That confidence has persisted despite a steady drumbeat of controversy. Hegseth has come under scrutiny for his misuse of the Signal messaging app and handling of military operations in the Caribbean. Noem has faced criticism over her extravagant spending and a feud<\/a> with the border czar, Tom Homan.<\/p>\n

The FBI director, Kash Patel, has drawn bipartisan opprobrium<\/a> over his stewardship of sensitive investigations, while the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, raised eyebrows earlier this year after warning, in a video message, that the world was \u201con the brink of nuclear annihilation\u201d.<\/p>\n

The closest brush with dismissal came when the then national security adviser Mike Waltz was quietly replaced by Marco Rubio \u2013 only to be recycled as Trump\u2019s nominee<\/a> for US ambassador to the United Nations.<\/p>\n

Critics say the reason is simple: the president has assembled a court of loyalists, bound less by institutional independence than by personal allegiance. They point to cabinet meetings<\/a> in which secretaries strive to outdo each other by lavishing bountiful praise on their boss.<\/p>\n

Bill Galston<\/a>, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: <\/em>\u201cThey\u2019re functioning in an environment now when it\u2019s loyalty <\/strong>\u00fcber alles<\/em>. If you are loyal and a fighter, the scales will tend to tip in your favour, even if you make mistakes. The mistakes are secondary and the loyalty and constant aggression are primary. I\u2019m sure Trump loves the fact that Hegseth never backs down, never admits error.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are further reasons for Trump to say you are not<\/em> fired. Axing a cabinet member would mean having to find a replacement, and that could involve a messy confirmation process in the Senate. Even when Trump was at the zenith of his power earlier this year, Hegseth was confirmed by just one vote<\/a> while Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr, now the health secretary, cleared the bar by two.<\/p>\n

Now, with Trump\u2019s approval rating plummeting and midterm elections looming, the Senate might prove more sceptical about the president\u2019s unconventional choices.<\/p>\n

Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton, added: \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that Republicans<\/a> in Congress are less compliant than they were a year ago because they have surely noticed that the president\u2019s standing with the public has declined remarkably and that they could be dragged down with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can imagine that the confirmation proceedings would be arenas for unfavourable reviews of what had happened in those departments or agencies under the prior leadership during the first year, and that wouldn\u2019t be good either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rick Wilson<\/a>, a former Republican strategist, agreed. He said: \u201cTrump knows at this point there are fewer possibilities for a Senate confirmation for the kind of people he wants now. He\u2019s not going to get another Hegseth, he\u2019s not going to get another Gabbard, he\u2019s not going to get another RFK Jr. Those days are done.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In addition, Trump does not want to admit that he made a mistake. Wilson, a cofounder of the Lincoln Project<\/a>, an anti-Trump group, added: \u201cTrump doesn\u2019t want to fire anybody. The reason is he feels like that lets the media win. He thinks the media gets something when he fires people.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The president\u2019s restraint this time around marks a contrast with a first term punctuated by high-profile sackings: FBI director James Comey, dubbed \u201cthe worst leader in the history of the bureau\u201d; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, abandoned on a rainy tarmac; and secretary of state Rex Tillerson, reportedly dumped while sitting on a toilet.<\/p>\n

No one embodied the turmoil and turbulence better than Anthony Scaramucci, dismissed after just 10 days<\/a> as White House communications director because of a crude verbal tirade against other members of Trump\u2019s staff.<\/p>\n

The difference now is partly one of familiarity. Trump 1.0 appointed figures such as Jim Mattis, a revered former general whom the president barely knew and who later resigned as defence secretary over foreign policy disagreements. Hegseth, by contrast, has been in Trump\u2019s orbit for more than a decade and is an unstinting praise singer.<\/p>\n

Tara Setmayer<\/a>, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, said: <\/strong>\u201cThis time around the reason you don\u2019t see the same amount of firings is because the sycophancy is the point. Trump has loaded his cabinet up with people who are loyalists first and foremost and not competent.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s neutered Congress in a way that is unprecedented. With the combination of lack of accountability and loyalists at a level we didn\u2019t see in the first term, it\u2019s not a surprise that you haven\u2019t seen high turnover. They\u2019re doing everything Trump wants them to do at great expense to the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there have been purges of a different kind. Trump began his presidency by encouraging millions of federal workers to resign and has removed holdovers from advisory councils, while the justice department has dismissed dozens of career prosecutors \u2013 including those linked to investigations involving Trump himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For more than a decade he built his brand on two words: \u201cYou\u2019re fired!\u201d And in his first term in the White House, Donald Trump did not hesitate to show his staff the door, often via an abrasive tweet. But since resuming the US presidency in January, Trump, the former host of the reality TV […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}