Donald Trump’s firing of Cabinet members is like a “set of dominoes,” one of his biographers says.
Michael Wolff, appearing on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast, was skeptical that any one issue brought about Pam Bondi’s firing earlier Thursday, though it has been reported that her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files was a factor. Rather, things are going so poorly for Trump that he needs people like her and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to take the fall.
“I think it’s just a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction: ‘Who can I blame?’” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “I don’t think it really relates to any one issue. I think it relates to [how] things are bad: ‘Somebody needs to be blamed other than me, Donald Trump, so I’m going to fire somebody’.”
After Noem and Bondi, Wolff said he could see more exits in the near future: “Tulsi Gabbard next week, RFK Jr. the week after, Howard Lutnick inevitably coming up.”
Trump, according to The Guardian, has been weighing firing Gabbard, the 44-year-old Director of National Intelligence, after she refused to condemn Joe Kent, the former National Counterterrorism Center director who resigned over the Iran war. Gabbard, Fox News also reported, refused the White House’s demand to fire Kent.
As for Kennedy, the 72-year-old Health and Human Services secretary, Wolff said last week that Trump is having second thoughts about his oddball health policies.
“I know that he’s been calling around and saying to people, you know, ‘I hear people say, Bobby is crazy. You think he’s crazy?’” Wolff told Coles on Saturday’s Inside Trump’s Head. “And you know the answer he wants.”
Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 64, has been stepping on people’s toes, administration figures told Politico in February.
“This is now a set of dominoes,” Wolff summed up, adding that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was instrumental in keeping Trump “in check” regarding drastic personnel decisions for a while. “But now he’s back in the sort of control seat.”
Wiles, 68, announced last month that she was being treated for breast cancer. Wolff said he has heard that she has since been “somewhat less present.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Commerce Department and the Health and Human Services Department for comment.
A Gabbard spokesperson referred the Daily Beast to a statement from White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, who said Trump has “total confidence” in Gabbard, “and any insinuation otherwise is totally fake news. The President has assembled the most talented and impactful Cabinet ever, and they have collectively delivered historic victories on behalf of the American people.”
When reached for comment, the White House provided its standard response about the author.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s--- and has been proven to be a fraud,” Cheung said. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
Wolff said Trump’s, now over a month old, war against Iran is the “inflection point” for his “downfall.”
“I don’t think he can recover here. Also, he is going in very shortly into his formal lame duck period,” he said. “Plus, we are approaching the midterms, which are going to be a catastrophe.”
“He’s going to lose,” he continued. “It is going south. So, his go-to move in that case is starting to fire people, which is going to increase the chaos, which is going to increase how deeply south this is going.”
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