Early in Donald Trump's second term, many people and organizations called for him to fire Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, and Robert Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, both white men. In addition, after Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, also a white man, was shown to have lied about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (Rothfield, 2025), many called for Trump to fire Lutnick. However, the first three Cabinet members to go in Trump's second term were women.

Women's departures from Trump's Cabinet

On March 5, 2026 — 14 months into his second term — Trump fired Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security (Bender, Gold, Aleaziz, Haberman and Kanno-Youngs, 2026). Then, about a month later, on April 2, he fired Pam Bondi, the Attorney General (Pager and Thrush, 2026). Later that month, on April 20, it was announced that Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Secretary of Labor, was stepping down "amid misconduct allegations" (O'Brien, 2026). Trump appointed three white men — Markwayne Mullin, Todd Blanche, and Keith Sonderling — to replace the three women. Mullin and Blanche were subsequently confirmed. (In June, 2026, Trump nominated Sonderling to serve in a permanent capacity, but as of early September 2026, he has not yet been approved by Congress.)

Therefore, Trump's second-term Cabinet has had 17 confirmed Cabinet members, seven of whom have not been white men, so the tabulation for Trump of "Cabinet members who are not white men" has dropped from 47% to 41%. This figure is still twice as high as it was in Trump's first term (20%), but much lower than the figures for Clinton (52%), Obama (59%), and Biden (60%).

There is one more Cabinet-related change that is worth mentioning. Tulsi Gabbard, born in Samoa to a white mother and a father with Samoan and European ancestry, a former Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Hawaii — and who ran for President as a Democrat in 2020 — was appointed by Trump to be the Director of National Intelligence. Though her nomination did require confirmation by the Senate, and Gabbard was confirmed by the Senate on February 12, 2025, by a 52-48 party-line vote, this position is not one of the 15 "official" Cabinet positions. (I have not included the various "cabinet-level positions" like the representative to the United Nations or the head of the Office of Management and Budget.)

Still, as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard held an important position, so it was noteworthy that after Trump got rid of the three female Cabinet members mentioned above, on May 26, 2026, Gabbard submitted her resignation. Although she claimed the reason was her husband's recent diagnosis with cancer, there was also speculation that Trump was unhappy with her, including because she had disagreed with him about the war in Iran (Volz and Barnes, 2026).

All four of these women seemed flawed and in over their heads from the get-go. It is quite possible that Noem will be prosecuted for questionable expenditures she made, including her inappropriate use of a private jet with a bedroom, tens of million dollars for ads that prominently featured her that were made by a newly formed company run by the husband of her former spokeswoman, and more (Bender, Gold, Haberman, Aleaziz, and Kanno-Youngs, 2026). It seemed likely that Bondi would be charged with contempt of Congress for failing to show up for Congressional hearings to which she had been subpoenaed (Gold, 2026); she subsequently testified before the House Oversight Committee, but nothing was revealed because the Republican chair of the committee allowed her to do so in an unrecorded closed-door session, and without her having taken an oath (Thrush and Gold, 2026).

As for Chavez-DeRemer, at the time she was fired she was under investigation for a variety of alleged political and personal transgressions, including an affair with a security person, using government resources for personal travel, and channeling grants toward politically connected friends (O'Brien, 2026). In September 2026, a report by the department's internal watchdog came out with devastating evidence of "dysfunction and toxicity" in the department while she was there (O'Brien and DePillis, 2026).

In the case of Gabbard, it had long been known that she and her family were involved in a cult-like group called the Science of Identity Foundation when she was a young girl. However, a June 2026 Washington Post article, which appeared shortly after she resigned in May, suggested that her involvement had been much deeper and more questionable than had previously been thought (Swaine, 2026).

The departures of these four women, so early in his second term, has been dramatic. According to the Washington Post, "more female Cabinet and Cabinet-level officials have left their positions during this term than at this point in any previous presidential administration (Vasquez and Lau, 2026).

McMahon, still in the Cabinet

Interestingly, one of the two women who remains in the cabinet, Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, was thought by many to be the least qualified of the numerous unqualified men and women in Trump's second cabinet. She had been the head of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), and she had virtually no experience in education — but she and the other woman who is still in the cabinet, Brooke Rollins, may have been far more capable and influential than most commentators realized. After Trump lost in 2020, McMahon and Rollins, along with Fox newscaster Larry Kudlow, formed a think tank called the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). While the Heritage Foundation was planning Project 2025, a voluminous tome that got so much bad press that Trump claimed during the campaign that he knew nothing about it, the AFPI was also making plans, though in a less public way. After Trump was elected, 80 of the 150 AFPI staffers were hired into the new administration, some in very senior positions (including Kash Patel, the Director of the FBI, and Pam Bondi). Moreover, as was true for Project 2025, the AFPI had prepared hundreds of recommendations, and many became executive orders during the first 100 days of Trump's presidency (Helfand, 2026).

McMahon is anything but a feminist – notably, her agency has not resolved a single case of sexual harassment or assault. As a former high-ranking officer in the Office of Civil Rights remarked, "It would be noteworthy if a single office didn't resolve one in a year, much less the entire agency" (Helfand, 2026, p. 35). So here too is yet another irony — McMahon, like the other women in Trump's cabinet, benefited from the many decades of feminism that enabled her to achieve the position she holds, even though she is anything but a feminist herself. Nor is she dedicated to the success of the department she leads. As of April, 2026, she continued to remind staffers that her legacy would be to have closed down the Department of Education.

Trump's hostility toward women

Given Trump's history of hostility toward women, it is perhaps not surprising that the first three cabinet members to be fired were women. Throughout the Trump administration, from the Pentagon to the Education Department, women in prominent positions have been fired. The Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, even "rejected all four women farmers chosen by their peers to represent them in an industry group called the United Soybean Board" (Plume, 2026). In fact, the decrease in diversity in Trump's cabinet and administration is part of a broader pattern during his second term in which many women in the workplace have been erased (see Lipman, 2026).

Moreover, as has been well-documented, Trump's hostility towards the press not only has included lawsuits against many media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN, but he has made numerous personal attacks against female journalists, telling them that their questions were stupid, that they are failures, and in one case calling a woman "Piggy" (Grynbaum, 2025).

William Pulte

Continuing the pattern of getting rid of women, and replacing them with white men, Trump named William Pulte to replace Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Pulte, as I noted in an update on the slight rise of white men as corporate directors in the Trump era (Zweigenhaft, 2026), is the grandson of an immensely wealthy man, a major contributor to Trump's political campaigns, and was named by Trump as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). The FHFA oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government agencies that oversee the mortgage market, and Pulte immediately got rid of many of the members of the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who were not white men. By late November, 2025, Pulte was under investigation by a federal grand jury for having "used inappropriate tactics to launch probes of President Donald Trump's political foes" (Stein, Siegel, and Mettler, 2025).

The economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (2026) summed up Pulte's qualifications for this position in the following way:

Who is Pulte? He's a wealthy nepo-baby, the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, the nation's third-largest residential builder. While his former role in his family's business may have led to his appointment as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his real job has been weaponizing the agency as a tool against Trump's perceived enemies — weaponization that is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office as a potential misuse of authority. Pulte confected false claims of mortgage fraud to try to push out Lisa Cook, the only black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. He has leveled similar trumped-up charges against Letitia James, New York's Attorney General, and several Democratic politicians. And he pushed groundless fraud accusations against Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair, who stood in the way of Trump's attempt to politicize monetary policy.

In his position as Director of the Federal Finance Housing Agency, Pulte clearly had demonstrated the kind of obedience that Trump values. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, some administration insiders had taken to calling Pulte "Little Trump" because of his devotion to the President (Heeb, Dawsey, and Baltheus, 2025). Many Democrats expressed grave concerns that Trump might try to nominate Pulte as Gabbard's permanent replacement. Apparently to address these concerns, Trump then named Jay Clayton as the person who would become the new Director, but when the Senate tried to fast-track the process so that Pulte would not serve even one day as Acting Director, Trump called off the hearing for Clayton's confirmation and instructed Clayton not to appear. Pulte, therefore, was named Acting Director, which did not require Senate approval, and could serve in that capacity for 210 days. According to Trump, Pulte was going to serve "only for a month or two" but he would be able to "declassify almost everything" (Svirnovskly, 2026). Within days after he was installed as Acting Director, Pulte began to fire national intelligence employees (Nakashima and Strobel, 2026). In early August, Clayton was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence.

The surprisingly high level of diversity in the early months of Trump's second cabinet, which — as I have pointed out, included many ironies (Zweigenhaft, 2025) — is now, twenty months into his second term, clearly in decline.

References

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Gold, Michael (2026). "Bondi Won't Appear on Capitol Hill for Scheduled Epstein Deposition. New York Times. April 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/us/politics/pam-bondi-epstein-deposition.html

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