Here come the scapegoats
Last time Donald Trump was in power, he went through scapegoats faster than he went through bronzer. It only took him six weeks to force his National Security Adviser to resign in order to make Trump’s first big scandal go away. From there Trump scapegoated one of his loyal people after another for four years straight, to try to keep the heat off himself.
This time around it’s been very different. Trump’s entire national security team and his entire economic team are embroiled in various scandals, some of Trump’s making, some of their own making. Yet Trump has been hesitant to scapegoat anyone. He could have made Signalgate go away by day three if he’d been willing to oust Pete Hegseth, but he blew the opportunity. And as Trump wrecks the economy and foreign policy, he has yet to scapegoat anyone from those departments either.
It’s not that Trump has suddenly grown enough of a conscience to take responsibility for his own scandals. It’s that Trump is so far gone, so deep into dementia, so clueless about what’s going on, and so unable to recall the tactics that worked for him last time, he’s essentially doing nothing at all. Trump keeps letting scandals get bigger and bigger, while he sits on his thumbs and cheats at golf. Except it appears that’s about to change.
After the news broke this weekend that Pete Hegseth also shared secret battle plans with his wife and his brother, someone leaked to the media that Trump is finally considering ousting Hegseth. It’s not clear if this leak came from Trump or someone else, but either way it came from someone high up enough in the Trump regime for the media to feel comfortable printing it. In other words, Trump may indeed be about to scapegoat Hegseth.
This comes even as Trump is reportedly trying to scapegoat Marco Rubio for the failed Russia-Ukraine negotiations (which never had a chance with Trump playing for Team Russia), and scapegoat someone like Scott Bessent for the collapse of the economy (which Trump did all by himself).
There’s so much leaking right now about Trump scapegoating these various people, there has to be something to it. Either Trump has finally grown so tired of his presidency failing that he suddenly remembered that he used to scapegoat someone every other week, or Trump’s top people have finally decided to force Trump to scapegoat people by leaking what amount to self fulfilling prophecies.
Thus far I’ve been of the mindset that Trump’s refusal to scapegoat anyone has been good news for us, because it’s ensured that Trump’s scandals and failings remain hanging around his own neck. But if we are finally entering that part where heads start rolling, so be it. Trump has waited far too long, and his scandals have gotten far too big to be swept under the rug with a firing or two. And if Trump starts ousting his own top people en masse now, he’ll look like an idiot. Bring it on.
