All credit to AP writer Jonathan Lemire for this lede:
One Cabinet member was grilled by Congress about alleged misuse of taxpayer funds for private flights. Another faced an extraordinary revolt within his own department amid a swirling ethics scandal. A third has come under scrutiny for her failure to answer basic questions about her job in a nationally televised interview.
And none of them was the one Trump fired.
Trump once hailed them as "the finest group of people ever assembled as a Cabinet." Now he his likely wondering whether Chief of Staff John Kelly will allow him to deploy an en masse Twitter firing without being forced to follow up with a phone call like he did with his newly ousted Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Heck, why not just include Kelly in that blanket dismissal? He's the pr*sident, by god!
“Donald Trump is a lone-wolf president who doesn’t want to co-govern with anybody and doesn’t want anyone else getting the credit,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. “For his Cabinet, he brought in a bizarre strand of outsiders and right-wing ideologues. Many are famed conservative or wealthy business people, but that doesn’t mean you understand good governance.”
And as we've noted before, this "bizarre strand of outsiders" was Trump’s “A” team. We shudder to think about what's coming next. Meanwhile, back in Trump fantasyland ...
“I’ve gotten to know a lot of people very well over the last year,” Trump told reporters at the White House, “and I’m really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want.”
Other things ... like a Space Force?
Trump apparently despises just about everyone in his cabinet for either making him look bad or getting too much attention. Maybe he’s forgotten that he chose them. The only people who appear to be safe at the moment are Defense Secretary James Mattis (Trump loves a good military strongman as long as he's not lording over him) and two former tea party zealots who are Grade A butt kissers—Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and CIA Director and now Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo.
That about sums up who has a chance of surviving in Trump's cabinet—generals (at a distance) and Trump butt kissers.