In President Donald Trump’s first term, the revolving door in his cabinet was spinning fast enough to churn butter.
This time around, there have been no major departures or any substantial chatter around replacements so far. “I don’t think anyone is at imminent risk” of losing their job, a former Trump administration official from the first term tells me. “It’s been a much tighter ship, and that’s a result of the fact that, in 2016, they didn’t expect to win.”
There’s still very much a hot seat in Trump 2.0. It just happens to be more evenly shared.
In a highly informal Inner Loop poll of presidential advisers conducted over the past week, I found that there’s a consensus building around which top officials are on the ropes. I asked these sources to rank, in order, the five Cabinet-level officials they thought were in the worst standing with Trump. (“The entire premise of this story is ridiculous—which is to be expected for Wired,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson tells me in a statement. “The President’s entire cabinet is working to flawlessly execute his agenda to Make America Great Again and he is pleased with each of their successes and hard work.”)
At the top of everyone’s lists was either commerce secretary Howard Lutnick or attorney general Pam Bondi. None of these advisers wanted to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, but his ghost kept showing up in their rankings. Both Lutnick and Bondi have made unforced errors involving Trump’s former friend and convicted sex offender, with Lutnick recently going on a lengthy tangent during a New York Post podcast interview about how creeped out he was by Epstein, his one-time neighbor in Manhattan.
Lutnick went into detail about how he almost instantly found Epstein to be “disgusting” and palpably repulsive, to the point that he and his wife quickly left an Epstein home tour that involved a look at a massage table. His comments also earned him a letter from Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who asked Lutnick to come and testify on any firsthand information he has about Epstein.
In July, Bondi opened up the biggest can of worms facing the administration after the Department of Justice and the FBI determined there was no “client list” or evidence Epstein blackmailed wealthy and powerful men. (Lutnick didn’t seem to get the memo. In his podcast appearance, the commerce secretary literally described Epstein as “the greatest blackmailer ever.”)