Who Will Be the Second Trump Cabinet Member to Go?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that NPR’s single-sourced, short-on-details report that the White House has started looking to replace Secretary of Defense and group chat enthusiast Pete Hegseth is accurate. With a “full-blown meltdown” apparently underway inside the Pentagon, it isn’t hard to picture a very-near-future where the dramatically unqualified Fox News host slinks away either voluntarily or not from his “warfighters” into whatever nearby bar will have him. In such a future, the obvious question then becomes: Who’s next?

During Trump’s first term, only six central Cabinet officials survived the entire four years. Those included Steve Mnuchin (Treasury), Sonny Perdue (Agriculture), Wilbur Ross (Commerce), Ben Carson (HUD), Elaine Chao (Transportation, resigned after January 6 with days left in the term), and Betsy DeVos (Education, also a post-J6 resignation) — there doesn’t seem to be any obvious pattern there, of why they survived and everyone from Scott Pruitt (EPA) to Rex Tillerson (State) couldn’t go the distance. And so perhaps predicting who will follow Hegseth out the revolving door is a fool’s errand — let’s give it a shot anyway.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio: 12/1 odds

Marco “99-0” Rubio has been among the most gleefully cruel carriers of the boss’s message in these early months of the administration. He has not slipped up in a meaningful sense, or wavered from Trump’s desired course, or demonstrated any of the slapstick incompetence plaguing Hegseth. The strike against him, though, is simple: He is Marco Rubio. He couldn’t talk his way out of a Chris Christie shellacking during a debate, he changes positions on anything at the slightest breeze, and his degree of lickspittledom will almost certainly rub Trump the wrong way at some point, for some reason.