US President Donald Trump’s first term in office sometimes looked like an episode of “The Apprentice.” He fired or forced out eight Cabinet members, with 14 in total leaving – more than the preceding three presidents combined. Total turnover among his top officials was 92% across all four years, higher than that of his immediate predecessors. Michael Flynn, for example, was removed as national security advisor less than a month after Trump first took office, while Anthony Scaramucci lasted just 10 days as White House communications director.
“The first administration was just musical chairs,” Matthew Bartlett, a State Department official during Trump’s first term, told GZERO. “It became something of a sideshow.”
Fast forward to the second term, and the number of firings has dried up. Turnover among his top White House lieutenants was down in the first year of his second term, compared to the corresponding year of his first stint. It took Trump over a year to remove a Cabinet member: the US president removed Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary last week.
It’s part of a larger strategy for Trump’s inner circle, which White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles laid out just before the inauguration.
“My team and I will not tolerate backbiting, second-guessing inappropriately, or drama,” Wiles told Axios in January 2025. “These are counterproductive to the mission.”
The new approach hasn’t necessarily borne stability, though.
There have been reports of disarray at several agencies within the Trump administration. First, it was the Defense Department: Pete Hegseth was found to be sharing war strategies on Signal chat that included a journalist from The Atlantic, amid other reports of chaos at the Pentagon. Last summer, Attorney General Pam Bondi angered both the president and the US public alike with her handling of the Epstein files. Early this year, those same Epstein files revealed that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had a closer relationship with the child sex offender than he initially stated.
Then there’s Noem. Reports of chaos at DHS began to emerge earlier this year, including the firing – and immediate rehiring – of a Coast Guard pilot who forgot to bring a blanket from one plane to another. Then there was her reported affair with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s longtime adviser and Noem’s de facto chief of staff at DHS. She also incurred the public’s wrath after she suggested that Alex Pretti had engaged in “domestic terrorism” before ICE officers shot and killed him in Minneapolis in January.
Then came her testimony to Congress late last month: the former South Dakota governor claimed Trump had greenlit her decision to spend $220 million on an ad promoting herself. The US president denied this. “I never knew anything about it,” he told Reuters.
Days later, Noem was gone from the department, reassigned to a new role as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.
“I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland,’” Trump wrote on social media.
Let’s back up a second. When Trump returned to office last year, he decided to prioritize loyalty over experience when selecting his Cabinet officials. Gone were the establishment types like Jim Mattis at the Pentagon, John Kelly at DHS, and Rex Tillerson at State. In were those with a track record of loyalty: Hegseth, Noem, and even Marco Rubio, who had renounced his anti-Trump rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign.
In one sense, the strategy has worked. Trump’s department heads have remained ruthlessly loyal to him. They tirelessly stick to Trump’s messages, and berate those who cross the president – recall, for example, the meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. During Cabinet meetings, they often take turns piling praise upon him. They have also been careful not to step on his toes: Exhibit A is Rubio passing Trump a note, telling him to approve a social media post announcing a ceasefire deal in Gaza.
But while this administration has had fewer issues with turnover and disloyalty, another challenge persists: Cabinet members still have their own agendas they want to advance. Sometimes they have clashed on policy, notably with the decisions to seize Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and attack Iran – these decisions split the isolationists with those who favored intervention.
It all suggests the glue keeping the Cabinet together is not particularly sticky.
“It’s not clear to me that there’s ideological cohesion [in the Cabinet], but that’s true of MAGA generally,” Jackson Carpenter, a Texas GOP delegate, told GZERO. “It’s really more of a personal allegiance than it is a than it is an ideology.”
The line of succession. There’s something else that may soon cause division, something that is familiar to many past administrations: political ambition. Several incumbent Cabinet members have previously run for president: Rubio, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if any of them ran again,” said Carpenter.
Then there’s Vice President JD Vance: though he hasn’t run for president before – his only political race, outside of being Trump’s running mate, was for US Senate in 2022 – he has led virtually every single poll for the 2028 GOP nomination over the last year.
“You have polling that is just mind boggling right now,” said Bartlett. “We’ve never seen this type of dynamic where the MAGA base and the Republican Party are so dead set on a JD Vance as the heir apparent.”
The most obvious rival to the vice president right now is Rubio. Since Trump started focusing on foreign policy over recent months, the secretary of State has become one of the commander-in-chief’s most trusted allies – Bartlett described as a “remarkable MAGA spokesperson for the president.” Trump, who said on Monday that his foreign policy differed from Vance’s, has even started polling his close allies on which of the two they prefer, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Still, given Vance’s huge head start in polling, there may only be one way that Rubio can catch up with the vice president: getting Trump to intervene and endorse him.
“You have the political laws of motion here, which is that it looks like Vance will be the nominee,” said Bartlett. “Unless a massive force, namely the president, decides to change that.”
If Rubio tries to garner Trump’s endorsement – at the expense of Vance – Trump’s ability to keep his Cabinet in check will be tested again.
