Trump's Cabinet firings set a 100-year record

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

published 19 March 2018

After 423 days in office, President Trump has gotten rid of more Cabinet officials (three, in Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) than most presidents lose in their first two years on the job. In fact, NPR reports, no other "elected first-term president in the past 100 years has had this much Cabinet turnover this early in his presidency."

Most presidents since Woodrow Wilson have replaced just one Cabinet member in the first 14 months, and several have kept the same Cabinet throughout that time. Only three — Warren G. Harding, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan — have swapped more than two in the first two years of office, and Trump is easily on pace to exceed Reagan's four Cabinet departures in that span.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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