When Trump Fires You, It’s not You, It’s Him

FBI Director Kash Patel is next out the door, but it’s a misdirect.

It looks like FBI Director Kash Patel is the next man overboard off Trump’s sinking ship. Not that it should come as a surprise, after an expose in the Atlantic so damning he’s suing the outlet that alleged, among other things, that Patel has often been too drunk to do his job.

When things are going badly for Trump, he reliably shifts the blame away from himself and onto someone else. There’s a grab bag of reasons he wakes up in the morning and decides to fire a high-ranking sycophant, and Patel checked a lot of the boxes - bad press, main character energy. Trump already fired Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a purge that kicked off in early March. Most recently, Pete Hegseth axed his Navy Secretary (nothing like kneecapping your military leadership in the midst of a war).

This spate of firings in the last 60 days or so is new for Trump’s second administration, but it’s one of Trump’s oldest go-to tactics for when things go south, fast. Let’s go back to the last time the wheels came off - the 2022 midterms. Trump got behind a raft of hardline MAGA candidates, the diehard election deniers who’d made themselves in his image.

He endorsed Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, Blake Masters - real lunatics who embraced every inch of Trump’s MAGA platform. But we know how that played out. The 2022 midterms saw a massive blue wave, and, by extension, a humiliating loss for Republicans and for Trump.

He needed someone to blame for the losses, and he certainly wasn’t going to look in the mirror and do some soul searching. So he spun a roulette wheel and landed on RNC chair Ronna McDaniel. Now, she presided over exactly zero successful election cycles for Republicans in her 7 year tenure. But she didn’t force candidates to run on Trump’s losing platform. But she was going to go down for it when it failed. Trump forced her to resign.

He wants to take all of the credit when things go right and none of the blame when John Fetterman steamrolls your preferred TV doctor in Pennsylvania. Heads must roll. It’s the Roy Cohn school of management.

That said, none of those firings solved Trump’s problems. But if there’s one thing he’ll never do, it’s learn a single lesson, so here we are standing around the guillotine. But ultimately, firing Kash Patel is like shitting your pants and changing your shirt.

The midterms are fast approaching, and with Republican numbers writ large falling off a cliff, we can expect Trump to lash out in every direction. And whichever unlucky administration official happens to have been caught by a major publication humiliating themselves that week is going to catch the heat. Trump will keep firing people, and whoever he installs in their place will make the existing administration look positively moderate by comparison.

He can tinker at the edges, but it’s not going to treat the problem at the root.

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Kristi Noem wasn’t responsible for DHS policy, that was Trump. So getting rid of her didn’t solve the problem of brutal and deeply unpopular immigration policy. The policy never changed. Just the face of it did.

But we’re not collectively as dumb as he’s making us out to be. The economy is in freefall, affordability is dead and buried. Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and fill their gas tanks. That’s all because of one person.

There’s a pattern here: bad headlines turn public opinion against him, so instead of fixing the problem, he fires someone. The story becomes the firing instead of the failure: classic misdirection. Roy Cohn would be proud.

It’s going to keep happening, more often and faster. So don’t just watch who gets fired next. Watch what story disappears when they do.