President Donald Trump has realized that he messed up by surrounding himself with scandal-mired figures and is now “running scared,” one political analyst says.
Foreign policy expert David Rothkopf said on The Daily Beast Podcast that he sees “a sign” that the 79-year-old president and his chief of staff, “Ice Maiden” Susie Wiles, are panicking as his Cabinet of embattled officials monopolizes attention.
“They were picking the worst people they could to say, ‘Hey, we can pick the worst people we can.’ And now it’s blowing up in their face,” Rothkopf told host Joanna Coles, citing the cascade of controversies that engulfed Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. within the span of a few days last week.
He added, “Trump knows they’ve got to go, and Susie Wiles knows they’ve got to go.”
The author and former Foreign Policy editor-in-chief argued that Trump’s nomination of Dr. Erica Schwartz as CDC director on Thursday signals that the president and Wiles are hoping to turn a page as his other appointments flounder.
“They appointed a head of the CDC who is a woman, who actually is a public health professional, was actually a former... deputy surgeon general, who is respected in the field, and who is a woman of color, who is the least Trumpy nomination they’ve made anywhere, and is a good pick,” Rothkopf said.
The appointment of Schwartz, a Brown University-educated vaccine supporter, at the helm of the CDC marks a sharp turn away from its MAHA-fication, which saw Kennedy overhaul a critical vaccine advisory committee to install vaccine skeptics like him.
It also stands out as an appointment rooted in relevant qualifications, unlike several of Trump’s other appointments. Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, has promoted conspiracy theories and has no formal medical training, for example, and Hegseth, who wants to be called “Secretary of War,” was a Fox News host, and faced allegations of excessive drinking prior to taking over the Pentagon.
Rothkopf quipped that these appointments have ushered in a “golden age of chaos” of Trump and Wiles’s making, one that they are now trying to rein in: “They’re just saying, ‘God, we just don’t need the headaches. Let’s get a professional in here and stop having these conversations.”
Wiles, 68, has sought to redirect attention to the Trump administration’s efforts on “affordability” as the November midterms inch closer, but Trump and his Cabinet of embattled figures have derailed that effort by sucking up the oxygen amid multiple controversies.
Patel overtook the news cycle over the weekend when The Atlantic published bombshell allegations that Patel, 46, has been binge-drinking and behaving erratically. He has denied the allegations.
A few days earlier, Vance had sparked uproar by telling the pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” while Hegseth drew ridicule for citing a prayer largely invented by Quentin Tarantino for the movie Pulp Fiction to praise a rescue mission during the Iran war.
At the same time, a new biography drawing on Kennedy’s own diaries revealed that the health secretary once sliced off the penis of a roadkill raccoon in front of his children and took it home.
On Monday, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer became the third Cabinet secretary to be forced out in the last seven weeks, having come under investigation by her department’s internal watchdog over a laundry list of complaints and allegations of potential misconduct, including that she had an affair with her bodyguard.
Following her resignation, Chavez-DeRemer wrote in a statement on X: “The allegations against me, my family, and my team have been peddled by high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media and continue to undermine President Trump’s mission.”
“Susie Wiles was getting credit as chief of staff for not having the kind of turnover that Trump had in his first term and for sort of keeping a lid on all of this,” Rothkopf said. “But she’s just gotten to the point of no return.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI, the HHS, and Vance’s office for comment.
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