Will Trump Fire More Cabinet Members After the Midterm Losses?
Yes — President Donald Trump has said so himself. In his first sit-down interview since the midterm elections, recorded for CBS's "60 Minutes" in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Friday morning, correspondent Ross Douthat asked him, "In a previous lifetime, you were rather famous for saying 'You're fired,' quite often. After a big midterm defeat like this, do you expect to fire anyone from your team?" Trump answered, "Yeah. A little bit. I love my Cabinet. I think they're good, but I'll be doing maybe a few changes. I don't want to mention who." The full interview airs tonight, Sunday, November 8, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS, and the clip of that exchange, posted by "60 Minutes" itself, is here:
The plain reality is that this is the opposite of the position Trump took on election night. On Tuesday, in a phone interview with Fox News, he ruled out changing his Cabinet and said the results had nothing to do with it. By Friday, his chief of staff was gone, a senior Justice Department official had resigned, and the president was telling "60 Minutes" that more changes were coming. A team that was untouchable on Tuesday was being reshuffled before the weekend — that gap between the word given on election night and the record five days later is exactly why people are asking the question.
What Trump claims is that none of this is the election acting on him — the changes are his own choice, made his own way. He told reporters on Friday that replacing Susie Wiles was "not because of the election," and explained, in the New York Post's account of the interview, "I wanted to make a change. I think Susie's done a very good job… Stephen's been great and we've got to make moves." Wiles, he announced on Truth Social, will move over to his political operation, and Stephen Miller becomes chief of staff on Monday, November 9.
"I love my Cabinet. I think they're good, but I'll be doing maybe a few changes. I don't want to mention who."
The common-sense principle is not complicated. A president whose party has just lost both chambers of Congress in a rout cannot tell the country that nothing changes and keep, untouched, the whole team that carried him into the defeat. Somebody always carries a loss like this — that is how accountability works when the voters have just delivered their verdict — and the only part of the answer Trump actually left open is who carries it, and when.
The consequence is already moving through his government. Every secretary in that Cabinet now works under an unnamed list, and the calendar is working against anyone on it: a replacement who needs Senate confirmation can still be confirmed by the Republican-led Senate that sits for a few more weeks, but once the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, the same nominee faces a Democratic Senate that is promising investigations, not confirmations. If the first change — the chief of staff — took three days, who is still in place when that window closes?
The details start with the name that comes before all the others: Pete Hegseth. Douthat told Trump he had seen the Secretary of War in the hall, meeting with the president just before the interview, and that Hegseth's name "has come up a few times as someone people have called for his resignation." Asked, "Do you have confidence in him?" Trump said, "I do. Look, we've won two wars. We've won Venezuela and taken out billions and billions and billions of dollars already. We won that war in less than one hour, and nobody was killed." Asked whether he credited Hegseth for it, Trump answered, "No, but he was part of it." CBS News has reported that Trump asked advisers this week whether Hegseth should remain at the Pentagon, and Hegseth ruled out leaving voluntarily on Thursday, saying, "Just like the president. We don't back down." Representative Thomas Massie has initiated impeachment proceedings against him over the Iran war, which is a separate threat from the president's list — on the president's word, for now, Hegseth stays.
Nor did the changes wait for the interview to air. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned on Thursday, November 5 — she says she had actually quit weeks earlier and stayed only because Wiles asked her to wait until the election was over. Wiles's last day was Friday, and Miller takes over on Monday. And the "few changes" Trump promises land on a team that has already shed three Cabinet secretaries this year — Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer have all departed in 2026 — so the shake-up he is describing is an addition to a list that is already long, not the start of one.
Trump gave no names and no dates, and the full interview tonight may add neither. What is settled is the direction, because he stated it before he had made a single one of the moves: asked whether he expected to fire anyone after the defeat, the president said, "I do. A little bit. I love my Cabinet, but I'll be doing maybe a few changes. I don't want to mention who."