President Donald Trump is reportedly plotting drastic moves within his Cabinet to distract from his own sinking approval rating and perceived loss of control in Iran.
“A shake-up to show action is not a bad thing, is it?” one unnamed White House official told Reuters of potential firings to come.
The breaking point for Trump, according to sources who spoke to Reuters, was his prime-time address to the nation earlier this week turning out to be a complete flop.
“The speech did not accomplish what it was supposed to,” another official was quoted saying, noting the president’s dwindling support as economic issues persist amid the war.
Making big personnel changes within his inner circle would at least force a change in news headlines, said another official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The president’s first term was marked by a constant turnover in staff, as he routinely fired people via Twitter or they stormed out of his administration on their own, but Trump has been more restrained in his second term from constantly firing people, until the last few weeks.
After firing both his attorney general and Homeland Security secretary in rapid succession, the erratic 79-year-old president is said to be leaning towards more dismissals now, when there’s still plenty of time before midterm elections to tout a White House reset.
The president has reportedly grown increasingly frustrated by the fallout from his war in Iran and lack of positive media coverage, though he has apparently not thought to change his own messaging to the public.
“Let’s just say, based on what I have heard, Bondi is not the last one,” one White House official said.
Several sources told Reuters that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are potentially next on the chopping block.
Trump has been displeased with Gabbard at several key moments throughout his second term.
He was specifically annoyed by her testimony last year in which she said that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, which directly contradicted Trump’s view on the matter. The president was also frustrated by a video she released last June in which she criticized “political elite warmongers.”
Trump has also been frustrated by her failure to condemn Joe Kent, the former head of counterterrorism, after he resigned in protest of the Iran war.
Reuters reported that Trump has been privately asking other U.S. officials who should replace Gabbard as his intelligence chief.
Lutnick, whose relationship with Trump goes back three decades, has brought nothing but bad headlines for the administration in recent weeks as he has faced renewed scrutiny over his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
While Lutnick had said he cut ties with the late sex offender in 2005, he appeared several times throughout the DOJ’s Epstein files. The commerce secretary later admitted that he, his wife, their four children, and the nanny visited Epstein’s private island in 2012.
Some of Trump’s advisers have also been advising him to can Lutnick for over a year after his doomed “Liberation Day” tariffs rolled out last April. Trump had promised the tariffs would “make Americans wealthy,” and would “bring in trillions and trillions of dollars to pay down America’s debt,” but the Supreme Court wound up striking down the method by which those tariffs were enacted.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle disputed the report that Gabbard and Lutnick are on shaky ground, telling Reuters that Trump maintains “total confidence” in both of them.
“The President has assembled the most talented and impactful Cabinet ever, and they have collectively delivered historic victories on behalf of the American people,” Ingle told Reuters.
