Trump’s Vicious
Sewing Circle
April 26,
2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist,
reporting from Washington
I was already feeling
queasy about the Trump administration when I saw that the Agriculture
Department was withdrawing a Biden-era proposal meant to reduce salmonella in
poultry.
So besides making us
jittery — and “yippy” — the Trump gang is trying to make us actually sick.
It has been another
wild, whiplash-y week in Washington.
Amid an economic
catastrophe President Trump personally caused, a startling new
Times/Siena poll found him underwater, even on immigration, as
voters recoiled at the very thing the president loves: his overreaching.
How do most Americans see his first
100 days in office? “Chaotic” and “scary” — not the paternal reassurance he
might have hoped to engender with his cartoonishly macho style, his manosphere
heroics and his swaggering U.F.C. and wrestling posse.
“He is replacing the
meddlesome Nanny State with an aggressive, paternalistic Daddy State, based on
the deference and devotion of his underlings,” Gerald Seib wrote in The
Wall Street Journal.
All the talk about more
traditional gender roles hearkens back to a time when women were seen as
biologically unfit to hold higher office. For centuries, women were thought to
be too high-strung and unstable to have a hand in running world affairs.
What if women got into
the highest echelons of government, determining life and death, war and peace,
and began gossiping, catfighting, backbiting and clawing each other’s eyes out?
And everyone knew, of course, that women were more deceptive.
So it is grimly
entertaining to see this most “masculine” of administrations reflecting
stereotypes about female behavior that long kept women out of power.
Trump’s macho crew, it
turns out, is a vicious little sewing circle.
Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott
Bessent got into a white-hot shouting match in a West Wing hall, within earshot
of President Trump and his guest, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy. The
fight started about their different opinions on who should lead the Internal
Revenue Service but then spilled over into the efficiency of DOGE, Musk’s
efficiency team.
“Bessent criticized Musk
for overpromising and under-delivering budget cuts with DOGE,” Axios’s Marc
Caputo reported. “Musk
clapped back by calling Bessent a ‘Soros agent’ and accusing him of having run
‘a failed hedge fund.’”
Musk also had a nasty
spat with Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, earlier this month over
Teslas and tariffs. Musk posted on X that “Navarro is dumber than a sack of
bricks.”
Karoline Leavitt, the
White House press secretary, dismissed that hair-pulling incident, saying,
“Boys will be boys.”
There was once a fear
that women would be too emotional at the top, but look at Elon. He maniacally
jumps around the stage, and he is known to mist up in the middle of interviews
about his work and his love life.
And if you don’t want an unstable
creature at the top, particularly at that bastion of masculinity, the Pentagon,
why would you hire Pete Hegseth?
The lightweight former
Fox weekend anchor, who promised to forgo his louche ways, made dunderheaded blunders with Signal that could have jeopardized
our troops, and invited a nest of vipers into the Defense Department. (He even
ordered up a spiffy makeup studio next to the Pentagon briefing room, as
CBS reported.)
Hegseth followed his
boss’s reality-show lead and produced the Real Housewives of the Pentagon,
casting fellow military veterans as top advisers, even if none of these men had
the requisite experience to run a sprawling, global organization, and they had
no interest in learning. Instead, they lit up the Pentagon with bawdy meetings,
vicious rivalries and power feuds. The bad-mouthing led to three firings and, on
Thursday, the abrupt departure of Hegseth’s chief of staff.
Having his wife,
Jennifer, a former Fox producer, by his side at the Pentagon, where she
is known as the
“human leash,” has not kept Pete on the straight and narrow.
Hapless Hegseth fought
back at the White House Easter egg roll by accusing reporters of publishing
“hoaxes” and using “disgruntled former employees” to smear him.
But the man in charge of a department
with a budget of approximately $850 billion seems flighty and shaky, unable to
find loyal consiglieres and unable to stick to the Pentagon’s classified
message system, which is among the best in the world for a reason. It protects
our troops.
When Gen. Jim Mattis was
Trump’s defense secretary in the first term, he conveyed the idea that he was
the adult who would make sure the highchair king in the Oval did not do
anything crazy with our military. But who is the adult now?
Trump, who often casts by looks, may
have liked Hegseth’s slick style and pretty face. But even the Emperor of Chaos
must realize this Princess of Chaos has to go.
