Susie Wiles should have been untouchable. She’d been with President Trump since his first bid for the White House. She was one of the few people who’d stuck around after the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, when just about everyone else thought his political career was over. And as his chief of staff for the past two years, she was a stabilizing force in an administration that sorely needed one. But Wiles—whom Trump jettisoned last week after Republicans’ devastating midterm losses—likely had at least one thing working against her: that second X chromosome.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has refrained from the firing sprees of his first term, but he has shown a remarkable willingness to discard his female senior administration officials when they displease him. With the abrupt elevation of Stephen Miller to chief of staff last Friday, Wiles joined that most unenviable troop—The Scapegals.
Including Wiles, Trump has fired or pushed out at least half a dozen top women this term, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. (Zacharia announced the departure of Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle from the White House podium—the only news she would share, it turned out—a mere three days before she, too, was summarily dismissed.) Other senior women have also left—Karoline Leavitt, who preceded Zacharia as press secretary, and Harmeet Dhillon, who ran the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, among others—albeit on their own terms. Most of the senior women who were forced out have since been replaced by men.
When charges of misogyny pop up against Trump, as they have with regularity in both of his terms, his defenders are quick to claim he is an equal-opportunity offender who is just as likely to attack, say, a white male journalist as he is a female reporter of color. But this time, counterexamples are hard to find. One of the few senior men to have been jettisoned is Mike Waltz, Trump’s first national security adviser, who was binned after less than four months, following his Signalgate mishap. (He ended up with a cushy consolation prize: ambassador to the United Nations.)
A number of the discarded women had, shall we say, less than illustrious records. Zacharia—who failed the California bar yet repeatedly referred to herself as a lawyer—was fired after five days on the job following a disastrous debut at the podium. (That’s less than half of a Full Scaramucci—the nickname for the 11-day tenure of Anthony Scaramucci, a fleeting supernova of a communications director during Trump’s first term.) Noem, meanwhile, presided over the killing of two Americans by immigration-enforcement officers in Minneapolis and spent taxpayer dollars on glitzy commercials, all while allegedly deferring to her rumored boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski (both have repeatedly denied an affair), to handle much of the Department of Homeland Security’s day-to-day operations. Bondi, for her part, seemed to view the top Justice post as that of Trump’s personal fixer. (Ironically, Trump’s ultimate frustration was not that she went too far in doing his bidding, but that she didn’t go far enough.) And Chavez-DeRemer, who left earlier this year, did so amid allegations of drinking on the job and an affair with a member of her security detail, as well as accusations from at least two female staff members that her husband had sexually assaulted them. (Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has denied the accusations through an attorney, and the police investigation of the reports has since been closed.)
Like I said: These records are hard to defend. But even at the time of the Noem-Bondi double exit—Noem left in March, Bondi in April—a Trump official told me the administration risked the appearance of firing only “attractive” women, while allowing Trump’s top men to remain.
Now, about those men. It is not particularly difficult to list various sins and missteps involving many of Trump’s top male officials that, in most other administrations, would be grounds for serious reflection, if not outright dismissal. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who had not managed an organization larger than about 100 before becoming the Pentagon chief—is the face and top cheerleader for the administration’s unpopular war in Iran, which helped doom Republicans’ midterm chances. FBI Director Kash Patel generated bad headlines for alleged misuse of an FBI jet, for a viral video of him chugging beers with the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics in Milan, and for using FBI resources to ferry his girlfriend around the country. And few people in the administration seem to have anything good to say about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whom they privately gripe about as Trump’s most annoying buddy and who has bungled trade negotiations and undercut the administration’s messaging on Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has stood by them all.
“Donald Trump has demonstrated a much shorter fuse with women in power during the second administration,” Sarah Matthews, a deputy press secretary in Trump’s first administration, told me. “I’m not saying Kristi Noem and some of these women don’t deserve to be fired, but I think some of the men are not being held to the same standard. And it’s a pretty glaring disparity of who he’s willing to fire and who he’s not.”
Matthews, who resigned after the January 6 attacks and now is a contributor at The Bulwark, said she blames misogyny, but also thinks that Trump often identifies with men under fire. (When Maine’s original Democratic Senate candidate faced allegations of sexual assault, including rape, Matthews noted, with a touch of exaggeration, that “Trump was the only person in America defending Graham Platner” before he dropped out.) Stephanie Grisham—a former White House communications director who also served as chief of staff to Melania Trump—recounted in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed that after she told Trump that her ex-boyfriend, a fellow White House staffer, had been physically abusive, the president expressed surprise. Neither he nor the first lady, whom she said she’d also told, ever followed up. Though Grisham did not name her alleged abuser in her essay, she was referring to Representative Max Miller of Ohio, who had become the president’s deputy campaign manager and kept his role despite Grisham’s disclosure to the first couple. Miller has since been accused of domestic violence by his now-ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and he lost his reelection bid last week.
When I reached out to the White House for this story, the press office sent back a list of nine women whom Trump had elevated to senior positions, including Wiles (the first female chief of staff) and Leavitt (the youngest press secretary ever, as well as the first one to give birth while serving in the role). An official also noted that Gabbard was neither fired nor forced to resign, but left because her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers argued that the administration was a meritocracy, filled by people focused on delivering for the American people. “Unlike the identity-politics-obsessed Democrats, the President judges individuals on merit and qualifications, not immutable characteristics,” Rogers wrote.
I also emailed the trio of women—Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins—who remain in Trump’s Cabinet, to ask what they made of the high-profile-female departures, and see if they had any insights into why they had managed to survive for so long. The press offices of all three agencies wrote back. In a statement provided on her behalf, Rollins criticized “the constant effort to turn every personnel change into a gender story,” noting that Trump “has elevated women to some of the highest levels of government.” She added that, “as a woman, there is no one I would rather fight with to put Americans first than President Trump.” Andrew Nixon, the press secretary for the SBA, similarly said that Loeffler was proud to serve as one of Trump’s top officials. “President Trump hires based on talent and merit, not on gender, race, or any other social identity,” Nixon wrote. And Department of Education spokesperson Ellen Keast wrote, simply, “The Atlantic cannot even define what a woman is but has no issue extorting sexism for a headline.”
Trump agencies are not always particularly responsive to reporter inquiries, but on this topic, all three were unusually prompt. After all, when you are one of a trio of women remaining in Trump’s Cabinet, it makes sense to be a happy warrior, relentlessly on message.
*Illustration Sources: Alex Wong / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Eric Lee / Bloomberg / Getty; Eric Thayer / Getty; Samuel Corum / Sipa / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Kent / Bloomberg / Getty; Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty; Getty.