“Look I did not vote for Trump. Either time. I have been standing in the car pool line for nine years listening to every other mom in this zip code tell me that Donald Trump was going to run this country like a business and I needed to get on board or get out of the way. My sister in law cried into her green bean casserole at Thanksgiving because I would not stop asking her to name a single policy beyond build the wall. My book club uninvited me from two meetings because I kept bringing up the deficit. Karen from church told me I had Trump Derangement Syndrome and I told Karen that having standards is not a syndrome and she has not made eye contact with me since.
And now I am sitting in the pickup line at three fifteen on a Thursday afternoon, AC blasting because this is Texas and March already feels like July, and I am scrolling my phone and every single notification is about the Secretary of Homeland Security getting fired because the news broke a couple hours ago and by now the whole internet has lost its mind. And I am reading that this woman was asked on live television yesterday if she is screwing her coworker and she could not say no. While her husband sat behind her. In a room full of cameras. On C-SPAN. At one o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday like it is a goddamn soap opera except the stakes are national security and the acting is worse.
I have three kids in this school right now. If their principal got caught maybe possibly sleeping with the vice principal and then spent 200 million dollars of school funds on a billboard campaign starring herself, she would not get reassigned to a made up position called Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas. She would be fired. By lunch. The PTA would have that handled before the car pool line and we would make sure she never worked in education again. Brenda would have the email chain going before the woman's desk was cold.
But apparently the federal government operates on different rules. Apparently when you spend taxpayer money on a vanity project, lie about who approved it, call dead American citizens terrorists, get caught flying around on government jets with the man you are definitely not sleeping with, and then refuse to confirm or deny any of it while your husband is sitting six feet behind you, you get a gentle reassignment and a thank you note on Truth Social.
And her replacement found out he got the job at the same time as the press. A sitting United States senator learned he was about to run the third largest department in the federal government because he checked his phone. That is not a vetting process. That is a gender reveal party. Surprise Markwayne it is a catastrophe.
I cannot get my health insurance to cover a routine mammogram without three forms and a blood sacrifice but this woman got a quarter billion dollars to make TV commercials about herself. In English. To tell Spanish speaking immigrants to leave. That is like me taping a note to my front door in Mandarin telling the neighbors to stop letting their dog crap on my lawn. Who was that for, Kristi. Who was the target audience. Was it the undocumented immigrants who do not speak English or was it the Fox News viewers who needed to see you looking tough in a bomber jacket so you could run for president in 2028. We all know the answer. You spent 200 million dollars of our money on a campaign ad for yourself and the only person who did not figure that out was apparently Donald Trump who says he never approved it. Which means either you are a liar or he is a liar and honestly it is probably both.
And the affair. Lord have mercy the affair. I am not even mad about the affair itself because honestly at this point fidelity in Washington DC has the same survival rate as a snowball in August in Houston. What I am mad about is the absolute stone cold disrespect of sitting there under oath with your husband in the room, the man who sells crop insurance in South Dakota while you are gallivanting around on government jets with a guy who got arrested for groping a woman at a charity dinner, and you cannot say the word no. One syllable. Two letters. My eight year old can deny eating cookies with chocolate smeared from his eyebrows to his chin more convincingly than a cabinet secretary under oath. She sat there and called it tabloid garbage and said the liberal left attacks conservative women. Ma'am nobody attacked you. Somebody asked you a yes or no question. Those are the two options. There is not a secret third option where you give a speech about sexism and hope everyone forgets what you were asked. Pick one. Say the word. Unless you cannot because it would be perjury, which is a whole other level of stupid that I do not have the energy for today.
Her husband was right there. Right behind her. The man got up early, put on a suit, flew to Washington DC to support his wife at her congressional hearing, sat in that chair, and watched a room full of people ask her if she is sleeping with another man. And she would not say no. That man sat there like a crash test dummy taking a hit he did not sign up for on national television. And then reportedly he got up and left to catch a flight right before the questions got really personal, which is either incredible timing or the most dignified exit in the history of men finding out things they did not want to know.
And Trump. Donald Trump, the man with the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, satellite surveillance, wiretapping capabilities that would make Cold War spies weep with envy, he figured out the affair because he saw them share a soda can. A soda can. The leader of the free world cracked the case because two grown adults put their mouths on the same Coca Cola and his germophobe brain short circuited. That is not intelligence gathering. That is what Brenda three doors down does at the block party. Oh I saw Steve and Linda share a drink, something is definitely going on there. The President of the United States has the same investigative methodology as a bored suburban housewife with a ring doorbell camera and too much time on her hands.
And apparently he tells this story all the time. Frequently was the word they used. He frequently shares the moment he figured it out. He is proud of it. He solved the case of the shared Coca Cola and he tells people at dinner parties like it is his Sherlock Holmes moment. Meanwhile actual national security threats are presumably walking through the front door while the man who is supposed to be protecting the country is doing forensic analysis on who drank from whose can.
And can we talk about this boyfriend for a second. Corey Lewandowski. This is the man she could not deny sleeping with. This is who was worth the career and the marriage and the public humiliation. A man who got fired from Trump's first campaign for grabbing a female reporter. A man who was charged with criminal sexual harassment after a Republican donor accused him of groping her and stalking her at a charity event and he signed a plea deal. A man who reportedly was out there picking clothes for Noem designed to show off her chest. A man who fired a pilot because his girlfriend's blanket got left on the wrong plane. Her blanket. He fired a pilot over a blanket. That is not a professional relationship. That is a man who thinks he owns you and if you cannot see the red flags at that point it is because you are wrapped in one.
This is the cabinet of the United States of America. This is who is running the country. A woman who shot her own dog and wrote about it in a book like it was a leadership seminar got put in charge of 260,000 federal employees and a department responsible for border security, cybersecurity, disaster relief, the Secret Service, and the entire Coast Guard. And she spent her time making infomercials about herself, letting her boyfriend sign off on government contracts, bottlenecking FEMA disaster relief because she needed to personally approve every expense over a hundred grand like she was managing the petty cash drawer at a frozen yogurt shop, and calling two dead American citizens terrorists before anyone had done an investigation.
Two people are dead. Shot by federal agents during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. And this woman went on television and called them domestic terrorists before anyone had bothered to figure out what actually happened. One of them was 37 years old. Where I come from that is called bearing false witness and it is literally in the Ten Commandments that Karen from church claims to live by but apparently the commandments are flexible when the person breaking them has an R next to their name.
And she is not even the worst one. That is what sends me right over the edge while I am sitting in this pickup line watching Jennifer walk back to her Tahoe with the Trump bumper sticker. She is not even close to the most embarrassing cabinet pick. She is just the first one to get fired this term. There is a whole roster of these people lined up like a clown car at the circus and we are only thirteen months in. The first term he burned through cabinet members faster than my kids go through school shoes. Four Chiefs of Staff. Four. Rex Tillerson fired on the toilet via Twitter while he was on a diplomatic trip to Africa. Jeff Sessions publicly humiliated for two years straight like a dog that peed on the carpet except the dog was the first senator to endorse him and the carpet was American democracy. John Kelly a four star general who figured out that managing Donald Trump was less like running the military and more like trying to put a diaper on a cat in a bathtub. Scott Pruitt buying forty thousand dollar soundproof phone booths and sending his security detail to get his dry cleaning and track down a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel. A used mattress. From a hotel. There is not enough Lysol in Texas to make that okay. Ryan Zinke turning the Interior Department into his personal travel agency. Tom Price chartering private jets to go to lunch like he was too important for first class.
And what did we all think was going to happen the second time around. That he learned something. That the man who has been firing people on television for entertainment since 2004 was suddenly going to develop emotional intelligence and a stable management style in his late seventies. He went through more staff in four years than I have been through pediatricians and I switched three times because Dr. Mitchell kept telling me my kid's ear infection would clear up on its own.
Fifty three Republicans have already announced they are not running again in 2026. Fifty three. Thirty two of them are Republicans. They can see the tsunami coming. They can see the numbers. They are not retiring. They are evacuating. That is not an election on the horizon. That is a controlled demolition and the smart ones are getting the hell out of the building before the charges go off.
And the department she was running has been shut down for three weeks. A hundred thousand employees sent home. The people responsible for cybersecurity. Disaster relief. FEMA. Sent home. In March. In America. Where hurricane season starts in June and the power grid in my state cannot survive a stiff breeze without collapsing. But sure. Everything is fine. Strong leadership. Best people. Art of the deal.
The bell just rang and my kids are coming out and my 12 year old daughter is going to get in this car and tell me about her day and I’m going to smile and say that sounds great honey because I am not going to tell her that the woman who was supposed to be keeping this country safe got fired for being a corrupt incompetent liar who could not keep her story straight or her personal life out of the headlines. I am not going to tell her that the government in charge of protecting her is shut down because the adults in the room cannot agree on how to fund it. I am not going to tell her that 53 members of Congress have already given up on the next election because they know the ship is sinking.
I am going to drive home and make dinner and help with homework and just pretend everything is normal because that is what moms do. We hold it together while everything falls apart.
But I swear to God if Jennifer says another word to me about how “he tells it like it is” I am going to lose it in the H-E-B parking lot and Brenda is going to have to pull me off a Tahoe.”
~Texas Mom (via I Fucking Love Australia)
