Serving At His Pleasure

President Donald Trump’s mind was on Iran. It was the final weekday of May, and shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz were again unnavigable. Trump had just left the Situation Room and was discussing the issue with several Cabinet officials in the Oval Office when an aide interrupted with some unwelcome news about another waterfront quagmire closer to home. A federal judge had just ordered Trump’s name removed from the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” as the White House had attempted to relabel the federally administered cultural complex on the Potomac River barely a mile away. While the decision foreclosed the president’s efforts to rebrand the facility, it did leave open a legal path to other objectives in his yearlong quest to remake the storied performing arts institution. Trump could proceed with major renovations, the judge ruled, as long as the center’s board was fully consulted. As the Kennedy Center drama prepared to shift into a new phase, Trump realized he lacked someone there who could do his bidding. Loyalist Ric Grenell had left the post of executive director two months earlier, replaced by a longtime District of Columbia official who had been the Kennedy’s Center’s vice president of facilities. Trump barely paused to consider his options. The president looked around the room, and zeroed in on the man who was 10th in the line of presidential succession, whose department had been founded in 1903 with a mandate to “foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce, the mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishery industries.” It now had nearly 50,000 employees working toward those aims. Not a single one of them had been hired for his or her expertise in performing arts administration. It would now be Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s job, Trump declared, to “fix” the Kennedy Center. One of the country’s oldest government posts had been redefined in an instant.

“If you bring a problem up to the president, and it’s not exactly in your lane, and it’s really not in anybody else’s lane, but there’s a problem, you will inherit that problem,” said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. “Because the president will listen to you, get your opinion, and he’ll say, ‘Well, go fix it.’”

Such is life in Trump’s Cabinet, where the job description is whatever the president says it is that day, and a secretary’s role can expand or veer with his latest fixation. (A Commerce Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Lutnick’s Kennedy Center duties.) Unexpected assignments, late-night phone calls seeking their input on matters beyond their official remits and major policy announcements on Truth Social — all can change the course of a secretary’s day, and sometimes a department’s agenda.

If Trump’s first presidency started with an aspiration to be built like a corporation, where headhunters looked for the most impressive résumés to fill top jobs, his second is structured like a family business. A small cast of trusted characters — true believers, there more for their familiarity and loyalty than any objective qualifications — are always at hand, ready to be put on whatever project comes up.

“What you have is a very strong centralized authority figure, and everybody is trying to stay in his good graces and keep him happy from a personality perspective,” said one former senior Trump administration official. “Trump is a very strong monarch, and when you have a strong monarch and weak barons, they’ve got to constantly go to the king for the ability to do anything.”

The story of Trump’s second Cabinet is not, however, just one more installment in a long history of federal departments losing power to the “presidential branch,” as political scientist Matthew Dickinson has described a phenomenon he traces back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Trump’s top appointees have had more personal exposure to the president than many of their predecessors. But that access to Trump has not always translated into greater influence over the administration’s agenda.

In just the past few months, members of Trump’s Cabinet and agency heads have regularly found themselves blindsided, overruled or scrambling to implement the president’s announcements on some of the most sensitive issues in their portfolios. The president countermanded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the U.S. military posture in Europe, committing 5,000 troops after Hegseth canceled a deployment to Poland. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress that while his department had been working on it, he was “not ready to discuss” how Treasury would implement Trump’s proposal to send $5,000 checks to Americans if Republicans won the election. The president reversed Mullin’s pause on Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops, with a post on Truth Social, while the White House withdrew Mullin’s pick to oversee the agency. (“President Trump and I are on the same page,” Mullin later wrote in a social media post.)

Many members of the Cabinet appear content with the exchange of power for proximity. Those who have thrived have accepted that they are not autonomous policymakers, but advisers whose views Trump may consider alongside those of many others — at times waiting silently for his social media posts to learn where he stands. And those who have been ousted — including the heads of the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Labor removed in rapid succession this spring — have learned that the ideological alignment and personal loyalty that earned them their jobs are not enough to survive in them.

“President Trump has assembled the most talented Cabinet in history who work every day to implement his commonsense agenda and deliver wins for the American people,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a written statement. To the suggestion that Trump’s appointees treat him like a monarch, spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “President Trump is working tirelessly on behalf of the American people to fulfill his commonsense America First agenda that nearly 80 million people elected him for.”

We attempted to speak with every member of Trump’s second-term Cabinet about what it is like to serve the president, and reached many of them. We ultimately interviewed more than three dozen people, including executive branch staffers and former officials, granting some anonymity to discuss those sensitive dynamics with full candor.

“During the first term, maybe like 20% of people thought Trump was saving the world, and like 80% of the people thought they were saving the world from Trump,” said a senior administration official. “Now it’s like 95% of people think Trump is saving the world, and so they’re believers.”

Linda McMahon was in her living room late one night, shortly after Trump won his second election, when her phone rang. Trump wanted to know if the woman who had led the Small Business Administration in his first term — and had been CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment before that — wanted to be his secretary of Education.

“Mr. President,” McMahon recalled telling him, “you know that I have not been in the world of education.”

“Well, you did graduate from college, didn’t you?” he responded, according to McMahon’s recollection.

Trump wasn’t looking for someone with education credentials. What he wanted instead was another business leader that would deliver a “return on investment” in the Department of Education. He also said her goal would be to put herself “out of a job” with the eventual downsizing of the department, she recalled.

“That’s not necessarily how I would expect to be courted,” she chuckled before accepting his request. McMahon would be the only one of two members from Trump’s first Cabinet — along with budget director Russ Vought — to be invited back for the second.

In his first term, Trump — new to Washington and at odds with many of his party’s experienced officeholders — largely relied on others to staff his administration. He tapped former ExxonMobil executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State after a recommendation from Condoleezza Rice and received advice from other military leaders to pick Defense Secretary James Mattis. He ended up with people he did not know in many of his top posts, and ultimately soured on just about all of them, turning over his first-term Cabinet at a rate significantly higher than other modern presidents.

McMahon, unusually, remained in his good graces. She chaired a super-PAC that raised $150 million on Trump’s behalf in 2020 and had to fight off post-election criticism that its careless spending had contributed to his defeat. In early 2021, she strategized with others on a project that would carry forward Trump’s agenda even while out of office. She had an eager collaborator in Brooke Rollins, a lawyer who had joined Trump’s 2016 economic advisory council at a time you couldn’t “pay people to be on” it, quipped someone who worked on the campaign. Rollins moved through a variety of posts in Trump’s first White House to eventually lead his Domestic Policy Council.

The night after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Rollins attended a long-scheduled dinner with top donors and political allies to seed funding for what would become the America First Policy Institute. Three months later, the think tank launched with Rollins at its head. It emerged as a hub for much of the planning for Trump’s second term, both preparing policy proposals and identifying candidates to staff government jobs. As Trump prepared to return to the White House, McMahon was among those tasked with helping to fill the Cabinet.

“He was a businessman before he became president,” said McMahon, “and I expected that’s what he looked for in his employees in the private sector.”

Trump, who would joke with Rollins that she could run a major Fortune 500 company if she really wanted to, considered her to be his chief of staff before ultimately selecting Susie Wiles, a savvy campaign operative who ran his 2024 political operation. Rollins and Trump had discussed which other post in the government might be the best fit, including the Department of Agriculture, a sprawling operation of what was then nearly 100,000 employees. Rollins hails from Texas, where she studied agricultural development at Texas A&M and worked for then-Gov. Rick Perry, where she shaped agriculture policy. But it was a record of loyalty to the president and his policy agenda that made her a shoo-in for his second term.

“She was willing to kind of stick her neck out and put her reputation on the line for Trump,” said the senior Trump official. “He knows that she’s been loyal in the down times, the 2016 campaign, after Jan. 6, during the exile years, during term one. She checks all the boxes. A lot of people have come and gone.”

The transition team — hunkered down at Mar-a-Lago and surrounded by televisions so that Trump could review bios and media clips — looked for others who could back the president’s decisions wholeheartedly and message his agenda. Determined to avoid the types of establishment figures who vexed the president in his first term, they prioritized candidates with whom Trump had a political rapport, or whose political identities had been reshaped through their identification with him.

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem had been prominent surrogates. Trump had campaigned alongside Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins in Georgia. Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum had been vice presidential finalists. Both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are former Democrats who endorsed Trump at the end of the 2024 campaign. He knew Hegseth, who would become Defense secretary, and Sean Duffy, who would become Transportation secretary, from appearances on Fox News, which he had treated as something of a talent agency for years.

“In the first term, just take Tillerson and Mattis: They had both collectively known the president for about an hour. One meeting and an announcement — that’s it,” said a former administration official. “Whereas Hegseth had known Trump for 10 years.”

Trump’s pick for attorney general, Florida congressmember Matt Gaetz, fit the mold perfectly: a telegenic MAGA acolyte who had stuck with Trump in and out of office and appeared ready to do his bidding atop the Justice Department. But questions about Gaetz’s alleged past drug use and sexual misconduct made it clear he would struggle to win Senate confirmation. Gaetz, who did not respond to a request for comment, has denied the allegations. Instead of fighting to win the votes — and risking very visible defeat in the process — Trump pulled the nomination just eight days after announcing it.

“He will back you to the hilt if they’re criticizing you on policy,” said a former Trump Cabinet secretary, but that changes “the minute it gets into personal behavior that’s really unbecoming or not focused on the things he thinks are important.”

Four of those Trump picked for his Cabinet had previously run for president, and others are believed to be nurturing ambitions to seek higher office in 2028 or beyond. Many accepted Trump’s invitation to serve with the idea that the Cabinet would be a productive stop on their way to what’s next — a chance to add an impressive new line to their résumés, cultivate ties within Trump’s political network and travel the country with the White House’s imprimatur.

Several asked during the recruitment process whether they would be able to bring trusted staff into their departments and agencies. But when they submitted the names they wanted to hire — including their communications strategists and former campaign operatives — the White House Presidential Personnel Office rejected some for being insufficiently loyal to Trump’s MAGA movement. Others learned where they sat in the executive-branch hierarchy when they saw their movements controlled by the White House, which required approval of major appearances and travel.

“The most important lesson for a Cabinet secretary is: You’re a staffer. … You’re not an independent operator,” said the first-term Cabinet secretary. “You end up with people who it takes a minute to realize, look, they weren’t elected. They don’t represent the will of the people. They may be very important in their own mind, and they have a job they were sworn in to do — but it’s done within the confines and the rubric of the president.”

On Feb. 26, 2025, barely one month into office, Trump summoned the 18 members of his Cabinet who were confirmed at the time to meet around the large elliptical mahogany table in the only White House space formally dedicated to their work. For many, just days into their terms, it was the first occasion to take stock of their new peers. 

“There is no playbook to be a Cabinet member,” Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner said in an interview. Turner had ended up there as part of a career which wound through professional football, Baptist ministry, the Texas legislature and first Trump administration, in which he led a White House policy council. But he says nothing prepared him for occupying a “chair in the Cabinet Room with your colleagues and the president.”

Trump asked Turner to begin the first meeting with an opening prayer, before turning away from his Cabinet to someone without a seat at the table. Elon Musk was a “big part” of getting the government back on track through his Department of Government Efficiency, Trump said, a novel entity which borrowed the naming convention of a Cabinet-level department without one’s legal power.

Musk took a few steps toward the center of the room, revealing a T-shirt that read “Tech Support,” which drew awkward laughter among those who understood the extent to which it was an enormous understatement of the wearer’s role. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, was two weeks into mass firings across federal departments and agencies, often over the objection of the people Trump had appointed to lead them. Trump did not ask Cabinet secretaries their opinion of Musk, but instead told them. There were some who “disagree a little bit” with DOGE, Trump said, then joked that those opposed would be “thrown out.”

Musk already hovered over the work of Trump’s executive departments, in many cases settling his staff into them even before Trump’s Senate-confirmed appointees arrived. “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government. President Trump has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” Ingle, the White House spokesperson, said in a written statement.

“I was boxed out of all decisions related to DOGE, and I knew that there were big things in the works,” said one agency head who was not yet sworn in when DOGE started making cuts. “They had come up with a plan for [my agency], and started executing that plan right around the time of my swearing-in.”

Tensions were boiling over by early March. Rubio was furious, confronting Musk during a private Cabinet meeting, while Duffy and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins raised specific concerns about cuts within their agencies. A month later, Bessent and Musk physically fought in a West Wing corridor after they disagreed on who should run the Internal Revenue Service. Others told staff to ignore his directives — like a demand that all federal employees submit a weekly email accounting for “five things” they did that week — or look for creative ways to undo what Musk’s team had done. (Spokespeople for Rubio, Duffy, Collins and Bessent did not respond to requests for comment on their interactions with DOGE.)

“The DOGE actions consumed 80 to 90% of my time in the initial months, and even up to 30 to 40% of my time later in the year, until we really got a hold of things,” said the agency head, who put together “a SWAT team” to play “whack-a-mole” with problems that popped up as a result of DOGE cuts and changes. In one instance, the agency rehired an entire department of nearly 40 people that had been let go because a new chief information officer wanted to hire one particular engineer in that group.

Members of Trump’s Cabinet largely waited out their unappointed minder, whose time-limited tour as a “special government employee” ended in early summer. At the first Cabinet meeting after Musk’s departure, on April 30, Trump reclaimed center stage. He spent the first few minutes boasting — about border security, fighting drug cartels and new foreign investment in domestic microchip manufacturing.

“We’ll go around the table, and you can hear it,” Trump said, for the apparent benefit of journalists as he turned to his left. “These are Cabinet meetings where they’re very open and transparent. And I can guarantee you, Biden didn’t do this.”

What Trump prefaced as a call for updates — “how they’re doing and what’s happening” — turned into a clockwise competition in which underlings offering gratitude for serving “under your leadership,” as many put it, seemingly intent on outdoing the preceding member’s praise.

Biden certainly did not do that. While Cabinet meetings have been a staple of presidential life since the founding, they have been used primarily as private advisory sessions for major policy debates, cross-agency coordination and crisis management. During Trump’s first term, staffers from departments and agencies crowded around the edges of the room; a small group of reporters were quickly ushered in and out so real work could be done in private.

In Trump’s second term, space around the table was taken up by journalists rather than staff. Reporters were being invited to stay, sometimes for hours, broadcasting the near-entirety of the meeting live.

“Usually the Cabinet meeting would be the other way around, with let’s say 50 minutes private conversation, scripted but private, and then there would be 10 to 15 minutes where the journalists would come in and they put out the furry mics and they shine the lights in everybody’s face,” said presidential historian Tevi Troy, a former deputy secretary of Health and Human Services and White House domestic policy aide during George W. Bush’s administration.

Most of the members of the Cabinet had more private access to the president than their predecessors had, and yet they understood that their job was not only giving private counsel but playing to the external audience. It began a ritual that would come to define the role of a Cabinet secretary in Trump’s second term.

“You know what?” Lee Zeldin, who as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has Cabinet-level rank, said at the July 8 meeting. “God bless America, because at the end of the day, President Trump is here, JD Vance is here and the greatest Cabinet ever assembled to deliver that much needed and highly demanded accountability.”

McMahon was among the lightest in offering praise, but the scenes around her represented a full turnabout from the Cabinet she had joined in 2017, one in which members often sought to temper Trump’s instincts despite his belief that their primary job was to serve him.

“The mentality and the relationships are completely shifted,” said the former administration official. “They all get what the joke is.”

Among all the new figures crowded around Trump’s second-term Cabinet table, Rollins was among the best-prepared to navigate the coming four years. As head of his first-term Domestic Policy Council, she had an up-close view of the way Trump cycled through top officials, with frequent firings and high-profile resignations that contributed to what one think tank characterized as record Cabinet turnover.

Rollins’ communication style reflects her new job. In public pronouncements, Rollins often describes moving at “Trump speed” and takes pains to cheer on the president’s work on matters far from her domain, such as his handling of a contentious meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. In her office at USDA’s headquarters, a map of the U.S. with pushpins documenting her official travels includes a post-it note scrawled with “America” atop the original topographical labeling of Gulf of Mexico.

Rollins learned to convey important information to Trump via visual aids, a preferred medium of communication she shared with a president who has little interest in dense written material. The new Agriculture secretary brought a graphic designer’s eye to the materials she could hold up for television cameras outside the White House while defending the administration against accusations it was responsible for soaring egg prices during her first weeks in office.

That early messaging blitz — including a series of charts Rollins had her staff perfect with typographical changes like bolding and larger font, along with an upgrade from flimsy paper to larger card stock — paid off with her most important viewer as she touted a drop in egg prices.

“The egg prices, they were going through the sky,” Trump said, addressing Rollins as he rolled out a slate of tariffs in April 2025. “And you did a fantastic job. Now we have lots of eggs, and they’re much cheaper.”

Rollins also entered the Cabinet with a clear idea of how to approach her colleagues, many of whom she knew personally from having worked together at her think tank or elsewhere in Republican politics. During the first term, Rollins saw what could go wrong. There was infighting, in which rivals undercut one another in the press and behind each other’s back to Trump, and rival factions inside the administration slowed the real work of governing. Trump’s chiefs of staff often did not attempt to manage this dynamic as much as resign themselves to its inevitability.

Policy disagreements could easily become contests over who had the president’s ear, often at one another’s expense, sometimes allowing an outside voice — a donor or lawmaker, foreign leader or CEO, television host or random celebrity — to swoop in and carry the day. That is what happened around one of the first term’s major foreign policy crises, when Trump had to decide what to do with thousands of troops he had deployed to Syria to fight ISIS. While Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser John Bolton presented Trump competing visions for an ongoing presence in Syria, a single phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan swayed Trump toward a third option, abrupt withdrawal, that left his top appointees both feeling jilted. (Mattis stepped down shortly thereafter, telling Trump in a resignation letter, “You have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”)

For Rollins, the most obvious point of looming conflict was with Kennedy, given Trump’s second-term focus on the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement that often treats conventional agriculture as the opposition. And they had no personal experience with one another.

“Bobby was the one unknown for me,” she said in an interview.

They had followed two opposing paths to the president’s Cabinet. One was a lifelong staffer who emerged from a talent pipeline of Trump-friendly conservative policy professionals that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. The other was a lifelong progressive Democrat and son of a former Cabinet secretary with meager government experience of his own who won Trump’s notice as a presidential rival and shoehorned an existing agenda — against vaccines, for alternative medicine and nutrition reform — into Trump-friendly packaging.

Rollins and Kennedy were both sworn in on the same Thursday in February, and a few days later, she invited her new colleague to lunch. They gathered with a few staffers at Navy Mess in the basement of the West Wing, in an executive dining room reserved for Cabinet members. The two new secretaries talked about their families and their kids.

During the lunch, Rollins, at one point, briefly interrupted to say she had ordered a Navy Mess specialty for the whole table: the Chocolate Freedom, a molten cake made with imported French chocolate. She joked that Kennedy would probably not eat it, but when she looked to her right a few minutes after the dessert reached the table, she saw evidence to the contrary. Kennedy was scraping his plate clean — the cake, and the generous scoop of ice cream, had vanished. When Rollins offered her slice, he took it, as well. As one of 11 kids, Kennedy quipped, he had to take what he could get.

“Bobby Kennedy, I’m so proud of you,” Rollins recalls saying at the time, laughing as she recounted the exchange. “We’re going to have a really, really good time.”

Immediately afterward, the secretaries had policy staffers meet to discuss in greater detail what they hoped to accomplish through the Kennedy-led MAHA Commission charged with delivering a report that would diagnose the causes of Americans’ high rates of chronic disease. Rollins aides were concerned with how the report would message pesticides, particularly wary of any language that might signal to farmers that they couldn’t use the chemicals.

Rollins and Kennedy agreed to present a unified front around MAHA priorities, visiting farms and hospital kitchens together and smoothing over apparent contradictions with boasts about their partnership. Their social media feeds became a collection of reposts of one another’s messages, amplifying the ways they agree as they promote their common agenda. Rollins, in particular, strives for events where she can collaborate with Kennedy and “tag Bobby” in her posts because he gets her “great views,” according to a fourth administration official.

“Our relationship is very close, and we talk to each other all the time, and we work together,” Kennedy said in an interview. “I spend more time at USDA than any other Cabinet department. My relationship with her is probably the closest on the Cabinet in terms of just collaboration.”

Behind the scenes, Rollins worked to engineer her own version of an interagency process that anticipated potential conflict with other Cabinet secretaries. In particular, she planned to have her staff coordinate with Kennedy’s on policy priorities, so they could present Trump with agreed-upon compromises that limited the chance either would be left entirely on the losing side. Top Rollins and Kennedy aides spent the spring of 2025 haggling over the language that would go in the MAHA Commission’s report, particularly around pesticides and fertilizers.

The report, released that May, ultimately stopped short of taking the hardline anti-pesticide position that many in the MAHA movement hoped to see, but it did call crop protection chemicals a danger to Americans’ health — a compromise that nevertheless enraged farm and chemical groups. As their lobbyists descended on the White House, Kennedy dispatched his right-hand adviser Calley Means to make amends with agriculture groups who said they were terrified the administration would move to ban pesticides. And Rollins publicly acknowledged that the report did not represent the agriculture industry’s interests.

Both were forced to defend their reputations for core constituencies: Kennedy making amends with farmers while stretching to convince MAHA activists he is still tough on pesticides like glyphosate, which he said in an interview the administration can’t end overnight because it would put “85% of farmers out of business.” Rollins, meanwhile, has publicly embraced alternatives to conventional agriculture such as regenerative methods, cheered by MAHA as an alternative to pesticides. She has pushed for Kennedy-favored changes to food aid and calls herself a “MAHA mom,” but while reassuring farmers that she’s not capitulating to what they view as the HHS secretary’s most extreme positions.

“Bobby comes at this from a different perspective, but we have met in the middle,” said Rollins. “He probably would want to go a little bit more quickly. But my goal and my job is to protect the food supply system and the farmers and ranchers.”

They both revel in the odd couple dynamic, elevating policy tensions as part of their pitch to the public. At an event in January celebrating the launch of new MAHA dietary guidelines, Rollins — who now refers to that day the previous February when both she and Kennedy were sworn in as their “anniversary” — recalled pundit predictions that the two would be the first to “divorce” in Trump’s Cabinet.

“Bobby,” Rollins said at the January event, “I’m so proud to say it just couldn’t be further from the truth.”

At times, their close partnership has succeeded in keeping Trump focused on a common objective. As the president deliberated this summer over an executive order to promote regenerative agriculture, Rollins and Kennedy massed with supporters of the practice in the Oval Office to personally head off a last-minute lobbying effort by the Farm Bureau to kill it. Trump proceeded to sign the order.

“Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Rollins have turned an unprecedented partnership into action — overhauling the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, supporting state efforts to remove soda and candy from SNAP, advancing regenerative agriculture, and bringing real, healthy food into America’s schools,” Emily G. Hilliard, a Health and Human Services spokesperson, said in a written statement. “The results speak for themselves.”

But the Rollins-Kennedy alliance has encountered its limits as well. When the Kennedy-led MAHA Commission completed a second report last August — this time a policy roadmap to address childhood chronic disease — top aides circulated it among agricultural trade groups with the goal of improving relations with farmers. The CEO of Bayer, the sole domestic glyphosate producer, used White House meetings to threaten the withdrawal of his company’s product from the U.S. market.

Ultimately it was White House officials who determined the report’s final language, according to current and former administration officials with direct knowledge of internal discussions. Mentions of pesticides were eliminated from the second MAHA report, and then Trump took his efforts to placate industry even further: Five months later, he signed an executive order promoting domestic production of glyphosate.

When it came to pesticides, Rollins and Kennedy both had a seat at the table. They might even argue that their ability to work together helped them to stay involved in the monthslong messy policymaking process. But there was a crucial distinction between formulating the policy options for the White House and helping the president choose among them.

Cabinet secretaries have long seen required testimony before congressional committees — either those with issue-domain oversight or budgetary authority — as a necessary burden of the job. But for those serving Trump, the routine trips to the Capitol are higher stakes for a president who often refers to his Cabinet secretaries as “central casting” and expects his handpicked loyalists to effectively deliver his MAGA message on television.

Nearly all of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries have used their rare televised encounters with Democrats to turn the tables on their interrogators. Armed with research binders about lawmakers themselves, the Cabinet secretaries often do not even pretend to evade tough questions and rather ignore them altogether, responding with a counterpunch or a deflection — often an accusation about the Biden administration’s record or the lawmakers’ own past statements and votes.

But the question that would lead to the first Cabinet departure of Trump’s second term came from a Republican typically very supportive of Trump’s agenda. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early March, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy inquired about Noem’s use of taxpayer funds on a self-promotional ad campaign that included footage of her on horseback at Mount Rushmore for a video against illegal immigration.

“The president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country, in which you are featured prominently?” Kennedy asked Noem in a disarmingly folksy tone that had become his trademark.

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes sir,” Noem said, “we went through the legal processes, did it correctly, worked with OMB— ”

“Did the president know you were going to do this?” Kennedy interjected.

“Yes,” Noem said.

That one-word answer, claiming Trump himself had approved of the ads, was a sore spot inside the White House. White House officials refuted Noem, telling reporters he had not approved of the ad buy. Trump would see that clip over and over again, and after months of building frustration with Noem, he began quizzing his aides and advisers on potential replacements. He settled on Mullin, then serving as a senator from Oklahoma, and in March fired Noem. A spokesperson for Noem did not respond to a request for comment.

“He certainly wants them to look the part. He doesn’t want them to embarrass him,” said the former Trump Cabinet secretary. “You look at who he’s gotten rid of. It’s pretty clear, you start being a problem and you’re gone.”

Trump does “not tolerate dishonesty” or a “lack of integrity” from his top officials, Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler said in an interview, not referring specifically to Noem. When Trump does turn on someone, it is like a “snowball rolling down a hill,” said a senior White House official granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

Over a roughly six-week period in the spring, Trump also booted Attorney General Pam Bondi, who faced pressure to use the Justice Department to fend off legal scrutiny and to target his critics and political adversaries. (Bondi did not respond to a request for comment.) Then came Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who was plagued by scandal and a widespread misconduct investigation into allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a member of her security detail and misused department resources. Chavez-DeRemer, who did not respond to a request for comment, has denied the allegations. The senior White House official said Trump feared her interview with the Labor Department’s inspector general would be embarrassing for her, and ultimately for his administration.

“He’s really invested in their success,” said Wiles. “It takes a fair amount for him to be unhappy with Cabinet members.”

Yet those officials receive regular reminders that they do not control their own destinies. In mid-February, the entire Cabinet was summoned to the Capitol Hill Club for a closed-door meeting on midterm election strategy. Wiles said at that meeting and in a separate email message that she would begin reviewing their plans for international travel. Cabinet officials should avoid unnecessary trips, Wiles said, so they could focus their efforts on selling Trump’s agenda to voters.

“Knowing that we have to focus domestically and that we have an election at the end of the year, I asked that unless it was a really extraordinary circumstance, they travel domestically,” Wiles explained in an interview. “If that’s laying down the law, I guess I did.”

The White House did not fully trust its Cabinet secretaries to speak to a domestic audience, either. Early in the morning of Feb. 28, U.S. Air Force jets began attacking Iranian military and nuclear installations and targeting its civilian leadership in coordination with Israel. Its impact would be felt immediately across Trump’s Cabinet: not just departments with security and diplomacy at the center of their missions, but those like Energy and Interior concerned with the flow of oil and gas, Treasury and Commerce which police sanctions and export controls on Iran, and even Agriculture, which had to grapple with the impact on fertilizer supply chains.

Nearly as soon as the strikes on Iran began, Cabinet officials received an immediate directive from the White House: They were to stay quiet so that the president’s posts on his Truth Social network could serve as the U.S. government’s sole narratorial voice. Broadcast appearances were canceled and typically hyperactive social media feeds went quiet.

Hegseth, who the previous week had posted on X three times in a single day about the U.S. men’s hockey team’s Olympic gold medal, issued one bombastic statement that Saturday afternoon and then did not publicly address the objectives or strategy until a Pentagon press briefing that Monday. (By contrast, Hegseth’s predecessor Donald Rumsfeld answered reporters’ questions within hours of the opening strikes of Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan in October 2001.)

On the most consequential weekend of Trump’s presidency, the people he had entrusted with the machinery of the American government were entirely invisible.

For an hour each night, Mullin is almost unreachable.

In the months since the president asked him to trade the Senate for the Department of Homeland Security, he has spent his days applying lessons learned from watching his predecessor’s downfall. Mullin has reversed Noem-era policies with the goal of keeping the president’s immigration crackdown out of the headlines after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. He has earned goodwill to repair DHS relationships on Capitol Hill while working to beat back criticism from the president’s MAGA supporters and immigration hardliners that he has gone soft. In contrast to Noem, who was seen as a micromanager, Mullin is comfortable delegating responsibility.

“Secretary Mullin employs a management and leadership style that empowers his agency heads, his staff, and every individual at the third largest department in the U.S. government,” said a DHS spokesperson. “In his confirmation hearing, he vowed to be accessible and communicative should he be confirmed. While serving as DHS Secretary, he’s continuing this leadership style and is in constant communication with leaders on Capitol Hill, his 22 agency heads, and the White House to deliver on President Trump’s promise to protect the homeland.”

Mullin said he averages about four to five hours of sleep a night, and when he first puts his head down on the pillow these days, that precious first hour is a deep slumber, the kind where it’s hard to be woken up from. And even if he is jolted awake, it’s the kind where he might be a bit disoriented — and can’t be fully trusted to recount conversations or events. That’s when he worries most he will get a call from his boss.

Trump did once ring him during that first hour. It was around 11:30 p.m. when Mullin put his cell phone down and closed his eyes. When he woke up at 4:30 a.m., he said he dreamed he’d talked to Trump. The panic set in once he tapped his dark screen. He saw a three-minute-long call, around midnight, with “DJT” in his phone log.

Mullin waited about an hour after waking before giving Trump a call back. The president answered, and quipped, “You don’t remember talking to me, do you?”

“No sir, what did I say?” Mullin said.

“You’ll never know,” Trump said. Then the president hung up. He still won’t tell Mullin why he called that night, using the incident to instead troll his DHS secretary and tell his staff he has “dirt on Mullin.”

Mullin is hardly the only top official who receives presidential phone calls that frequently. “We joke in the Cabinet, saying we’ll all sleep in two years and five months,” chuckled Mullin, who said during an interview earlier this summer that he speaks with Trump most days, except for Sundays. “He’s always, always working.”

Cabinet members whom Trump has entrusted with major policy priorities have become near-daily fixtures at the White House. Rubio spends much of his time working from a West Wing office, while Bessent makes the five-minute trek from the Treasury Department far more frequently than his predecessors did. Bessent spent part of 14 days at the White House in April 2025, the most recent month for which the Treasury Department has released his schedule. Similar records from his predecessors show Steven Mnuchin was at the White House on two days in April 2017 and Janet Yellen on just one in April 2021.

“At President Trump’s direction, Secretary Bessent played a hands-on role in getting the Working Families Tax Cuts across the finish line,” another senior administration official said in a statement. “In the final days before the vote, he brought members of Congress into Treasury late at night to work through last-minute tweaks and help cement the final agreement.”

Where past Cabinet secretaries have often complained about a lack of direct access to the president — Richard Nixon dismissed them as “crybabies” — Trump’s appointees have the opposite problem. Trump will call his secretaries at all hours to ask them about a chyron he saw blasted across Fox News or to press for a status update on a policy he has asked them to pursue.

The calls can be pleasant, framed by some as a perk of working for an accessible president. He might have a question about a specific policy, or want a secretary’s opinion on a different situation, even those outside of their departments. He might give kudos for a performance on TV, or offer an opening for secretaries to update their boss on the happenings at their agencies. At other times, the calls can be anxiety-inducing, piling on the pressure to move faster than the federal government might allow.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, received so many calls from Trump about a most-favored nation drug-pricing policy that he stopped answering his phone altogether, according to Kennedy.

“He was so anxious about talking to the president about being able to respond positively, but we got it done,” Kennedy said. (An HHS spokesperson said that “Dr. Oz would, of course, always take a call from the President. Secretary Kennedy was simply joking to underscore how seriously President Trump takes lowering drug prices for the American people.”)

Cabinet members have frequently found themselves in Trump’s entourage when he headed out to attend major sporting events, like NASCAR’s Daytona 500, Ultimate Fighting Championship and the FIFA Club World Cup final.

It takes a while for those new to Trump’s circle to adjust to his style. When Energy Secretary Chris Wright began telling a story about the history of quantum mechanics, he stumbled over the timeline, stammering between whether Albert Einstein had published a foundational paper 141 or 121 years earlier. As soon as Wright settled on the number, Trump turned over his shoulder and interrupted him: “Nobody cares. I never go back, and usually they won’t catch you.” (A spokesperson for Wright did not respond to a request for comment.)

While Trump’s Cabinet members say they prepare for questions about matters in their “jurisdiction,” as Zeldin puts it, they also know there is only so much they can possibly anticipate from Trump.

“I remember times when I walked in, and he would ask me questions about Georgia, might be about agriculture, maybe about politics, or anything else,” said Collins, who represented the state in Congress before becoming secretary of veterans’ affairs.

But Trump’s accessibility to those beyond his Cabinet sometimes dilutes the input of the officials designated by law to oversee policy implementation in their areas. They all have his cell phone number and an effectively open invitation to call, but so do lawmakers, donors, journalists, old friends and business leaders hoping to sway him. Trump will source opinions on equal footing from “the gardener, the congressman, the Cabinet member, members of his family,” said the senior White House official.

“You have to have the best argument, and if you’re going to talk to [him], you better be on your game,” said Wiles. “Whatever you’re selling, or disagreeing with, you have to bring your A-game, because he has had many other inputs, and he has his own opinions. Most of the time, his opinions are very strong.”

A conversation often meanders to wherever the president takes it. He can reveal private passed notes, or throw Cabinet officials on the spot with little preparation. Questioning sessions can function as a tool to “gather information,” observed Collins. The conversations can also be a test. He is known for his “bullshit detector,” said the first senior Trump official, and will sometimes deliver placebo questions, to see whether someone is lying to him.

“The president likes watching people squirm a little,” said a person close to the White House. “Or to put it differently: Who’s a player and who’s furniture?”

That has created a novel twist in the centuries-long power struggle between presidents and their Cabinet. Those now serving Trump have the type of personal proximity to the chief executive that others who previously held their roles would have craved, and play a more central role in the day-to-day life of his government as a result. But, paradoxically, that has made some current Cabinet officials even less powerful than predecessors who chafed at their perpetual removal from the Oval Office.

“Everyone becomes a head-nodder. There’s a huge emphasis to basically steer where he’s gonna go. It turns most of the Cabinet into yes people,” said a senior administration official. “Everybody wants to keep their job, and those who haven’t had a preexisting relationship with the president don’t have the ability to tell him the truth.”

The responsibilities of each Cabinet secretary were spelled out by the lawmakers who created the specific “executive departments” imagined by the Constitution. But Trump’s idea of what each role should be today is shaped more by his personal to-do list.

Burgum had expected to focus his time in the federal government — where he oversees a large and geographically sprawling bureaucracy of 70,000 employees spread across 2,400 locations — focused on Antiquities Act designations for public lands and promises to “unleash American energy,” as Burgum puts it.

But when Burgum’s phone lights up with a call from Trump — which he says happens most days that Trump is in Washington, as early as 8 a.m. — it can immediately throw his carefully crafted schedule into unexpected flux.

“When he’s either flying to Joint Base Andrews in his helicopter and has spotted something, or he may have been driving to an event in town, and he’s seen some other one,” recalls Burgum. “He doesn’t miss a detail — then he’ll be like, ‘What about this?’ ‘What about that?’ ‘Are we working on this?’”

One of those Trump calls that Burgum received this spring would drive much of his second year as Interior secretary. A friend of Trump’s was visiting the capital from Germany, and found the reflecting pool near the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial to be “dirty,” “filthy” and “disgusting.” Trump had his Secret Secret detail drive by for his own assessment, and he agreed.

Suddenly Burgum, who built a billion-dollar software company and overwhelmingly won two terms as North Dakota’s two-term governor, found himself doing a job roughly akin to that of a mid-sized city’s deputy parks director, or perhaps superintendent of a property in Trump’s real estate portfolio that peskily demands continuous maintenance.

An aide identified Burgum’s “historic revitalization effort to Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful” as one of six major accomplishments in office, by “doubling the size of our U.S. Park Police force and repair and restoration of 22 fountains, the removal of 162 homeless encampments, over 510 instances of graffiti removed and over 45 memorials and monuments restored to their full glory.”

“Thanks to Secretary Burgum’s strong leadership, the Department’s high level of success is crystal clear when you look at what we have accomplished,” an Interior department spokesperson said in a written statement. “The Department of the Interior has never performed more accomplishments for the American people than under President Donald J. Trump and Secretary Burgum.”

Across Trump’s Cabinet, officials are now doing jobs far from what they or the senators who voted to confirm them for the roles envisioned. While Rubio’s dual-hatted role as secretary of State and interim national security adviser, along with responsibility for USAID and National Archives, has become fodder for tiresome comedic material, other Cabinet officials have experienced their own, if less meme-able versions.

Duffy served as interim NASA administrator from July until December of last year. Collins, the veterans’ affairs secretary, served as acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, a role in which he was succeeded by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and which is now filled by Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who last year also served as acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services and acting under secretary of commerce for minority business development.

Increasingly it is Trump’s obsession with civic upkeep and capital-area building projects that dominates conversations with his Cabinet, and then demands their immediate attention, as well.

“Topics will go from what’s going on with the war in Iran to looking forward to the Fourth of July, and how clean the city is, and how safe the city is,” said McMahon.

“He could talk about his golf game or the upcoming activities of the Fourth of July, and how he expects it to be incredibly impressive, and looking forward to the things that are going on in Washington, and how pleased he is with the work that’s been done on the Reflecting Pool,” she mused this spring. “He just is so proud of that work, and you can just see his enthusiasm for city beautification when he’s talking about those things.”

When the Cabinet gathered on May 27, each member arriving to find a red “250th Anniversary” hat in front of him or her, the president turned to Burgum to talk about his work expanding oil and gas lease sales and increasing the productivity of oil fields in the U.S. But as Burgum finished, Trump’s mind went to another issue he associated with his Interior secretary. The president spent the next nine minutes talking about the progress on what he calls the “reflecting lake.”

Trump has formalized that interest across his Cabinet, impressing not just the Interior secretary into service. His secretaries of Defense and Agriculture now sit on a Make America Beautiful Again task force, along with Zeldin, Vought and “other members of my Administration invited to participate,” as prescribed by the executive order creating the task force.

“He just likes to engage with people around him on topics that are on his mind at that moment,” said Zeldin. “When he’s in the middle of the reflecting pool project, if you’re having a meeting with him, he’ll talk to you about progress being made in cleaning up the reflecting pool.”