The Cabinet Is Crumbling and Nobody's Pretending It's Normal Anymore

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Four senior officials gone from Trump’s Cabinet. That’s not a scandal—that’s a pattern.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Labor Secretary, just stepped down amid an internal investigation into misconduct allegations. She joins a growing list of Trump appointees who’ve already fled the building. This isn’t the normal churn of a new administration hitting its stride. This is what happens when you don’t have guardrails anymore.

For context: when George H.W. Bush took office in 1989, his Cabinet had one resignation in the first year. When George W. Bush started in 2001, same deal—basically nothing noteworthy. Even Trump’s first term, despite all its chaos, didn’t see this kind of immediate hemorrhaging at the senior level. We’re on pace for something different. Something messier.

The Chavez-DeRemer situation is instructive. She was supposed to be the bridge-builder—a labor-friendly Republican who could thread the needle between MAGA hardliners and the business wing. Instead, she lasted long enough to face an internal inquiry and then quit. The headline doesn’t tell us what those “charges of misconduct” actually were, which is its own problem. In a functioning administration, you get details. You get explanations. You get at least the pretense of due process before the whole thing gets flushed.

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The Mandelson Mess Shows the Problem Spreads

Across the Atlantic, Britain’s dealing with its own institutional breakdown, just dressed up fancier. Sir Keir Starmer’s government is now embroiled in the Lord Mandelson vetting row—and here’s the kicker: Sir Olly Robbins, the top civil servant, apparently knew Mandelson failed vetting and didn’t tell the prime minister.

Let that sink in. The machinery that’s supposed to function impartially, the stuff that keeps democracies from becoming pure personality cults, just… broke. Robbins is now expected to publicly defend why he didn’t disclose a failed vetting check on a peer who was about to take a major government position. Starmer’s had to go back into Parliament to explain himself. The entire thing reeks of institutional decay—the assumption that the rules are more like guidelines, that you can work around them if the reasons seem good enough.

This isn’t a scandal about Mandelson or even Starmer specifically. It’s a scandal about whether anyone believes the institutions matter anymore.

The Energy Thing Is Actually About Vulnerability

Here’s what people miss about the electricity bill story: it’s not really about bills.

The UK government’s planning a shakeup to energy pricing because the Middle East war has exposed how fragile Britain’s energy market really is. One regional conflict thousands of miles away, and suddenly the entire pricing structure looks precarious. That’s not a policy problem. That’s a structural vulnerability problem. It means Britain’s energy security depends on geopolitics it can’t control.

The unemployment number dropping to below the predicted 5.2% is supposed to be good news. Most analysts expected it to stay flat, but it fell instead. On paper, that’s a win. But here’s my read: in a moment when institutions are visibly failing and senior officials are getting pushed out or resigning, people aren’t comforted by labor statistics. They’re wondering if the data itself is trustworthy. That sounds paranoid until you remember that trust in institutions is already in the basement.

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Phone Bans and the Symptom vs. the Disease

Jacquin Smith’s plan to ban phones in schools by law in England is being framed as a solution to distraction and mental health. The government wants “a clear legal requirement for schools.” It’s reasonable on its face. Kids do spend too much time on phones. Classrooms probably are more chaotic than they used to be.

But I think this is a policy band-aid on a cultural infection. You don’t need a law banning phones in schools if you have functioning institutional authority. Teachers used to be able to say “put it away” and kids… put it away. Now you need Parliament to make it illegal. That’s not progress. That’s an admission that the informal social contract has completely disintegrated.

The Iran Negotiation Thing Is About Collision Courses

Trump and Iran are making a second attempt at a deal, and the headline says their “negotiating styles are on a collision course.” That’s diplomatic language for: these people fundamentally don’t trust each other and have no shared framework for what “success” even means.

The first attempt failed. Now they’re trying again under conditions that haven’t materially improved. Trump’s just purged Cabinet officials for various infractions. Iran’s probably watching that and thinking, “How stable is this process if the guy negotiating on the American side could be gone next week?” There’s no foundation here. It’s just two sides hoping the other blinks first.

What’s Actually Happening

The Democratic shift on gerrymandering tells you everything about where we are. Democrats used to oppose partisan map-drawing on principle. Now they’re pushing for it in Virginia, partly because Trump does it and they don’t want to be sucker-punched. That’s not ideology. That’s survival mode. When both parties abandon principle because the other side abandoned it first, you’ve got a downward spiral with no bottom in sight.

The death of George Ariyoshi—Hawaii’s first governor of Asian descent, who served three terms starting in 1974—is a reminder that there used to be politicians who focused on unglamorous work. He tried to diversify Hawaii’s economy away from tourism dependence. That’s not a headline-grabbing accomplishment. That’s just governance. The fact that his death gets covered as notable tells you something about how rare that kind of work has become.

My prediction: we’re going to see more Cabinet resignations before summer. Not because everyone’s suddenly incompetent, but because the entire structure that held people accountable to something other than the top guy’s mood has collapsed. When you lose institutional gravity, everyone eventually falls off.

I think the Mandelson situation in Britain and the Chavez-DeRemer situation here are connected by something deeper than either government’s specific problems. They both suggest we’re in a phase where the people running things no longer believe the rules apply to them, and the people who are supposed to enforce the rules have basically surrendered.

Here’s what genuinely unsettles me: I’m not certain what stops this spiral once it starts. History suggests institutions are more durable than they seem until they’re not. Then they collapse very fast.

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What I’m Watching

• Trump Cabinet departures through Q1 2025: Watch whether we hit five or six resignations/firings by the end of March. That’d be historically abnormal. If we do, it signals the administration’s losing organizational control, not just facing normal turnover.

• The Robbins testimony on Mandelson: Specifically, whether any Labour MPs actually press him on why civil service neutrality matters or whether everyone just accepts the explanation and moves on. If it’s the latter, that’s an official admission that the institutional norms don’t matter anymore.

• Iran deal attempt failure or success by April 30: If negotiations collapse again, watch whether Trump blames his own departing officials or Iran. That’ll tell you if anyone in the administration will challenge him or if they’re just echo chambers now.

• Virginia gerrymandering outcome: If Democrats win that fight and implement partisan maps while Trump’s DOJ doesn’t seriously challenge them, you’ll have confirmation that both parties have fully accepted the new rules. Democracy becomes purely transactional.