Let’s tell the truth. Many of the women President Donald Trump has placed high in his administration are very pretty. Pretty unqualified.
You have to admire Trump for putting so many women in top Cabinet and administrative positions. The problem is that the president is well known for casting people based on their looks, instead of choosing people based on their qualifications.
The result is a series of embarrassments, where the women he hired flame out simply because they should never have been in those roles in the first place. The resulting damage to the credibility of the administration is severe.
This past week, the ambassador to American Express, I mean, Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was forced out of her role when she asked a businessman to secretly pay off a six-figure credit card bill without anyone knowing. The individual declined, explaining that to do so would “blow up [his] marriage.“ Instead, the revelation blew up her career.
Guilfoyle‘s main qualification for becoming an ambassador is that she used to be engaged to Don Jr. Of course, that’s nothing new. Ambassadorships often go to campaign donors or to people a president wants to move far away from Washington. The classic example — FDR exiling pro-Germany Joseph Kennedy to London, where he could cause less damage.
Guilfoyle probably learned of her sacking from the extremely attractive new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia. Only a day later, we learned that Zacharia has claimed to be a lawyer, although she never passed a bar exam. She did pass the attorney ethics test, but she probably missed the day when they taught not to say that you’re a lawyer if you aren’t one. Fired after just five days, Zacharia made Anthony Scaramucci’s tenure of 11 days in the same role look like an eternity. If she wants to take the bar exam again, looks like she’ll have plenty of time to study.
But it’s not just the two of them.
Kristi Noem, late of the Department of Homeland Security, may have inflicted the most damage on the presidency. She led the aggressive ICE campaign that left two dead and harmed the president’s standing with Latino voters. She also turned the department’s private jet into a flying boudoir where, at the taxpayers’ expense, she and her alleged paramour, Corey Lewandowski, could cuddle at 36,000 feet.
Noem also spent several hundred thousand taxpayer dollars on television ads featuring her galloping on a horse on a beach, to no apparent purpose, her long tresses flying in the wind. And who can forget the image of ICE Barbie posing inside a maximum-security Latin American prison, with a bunch of tattooed inmates serving as an unwilling backdrop. Big oops.
Trump chose Pam Bondi as his attorney general, only to fire her a short time later, but not before she helped blow up the Epstein conspiracy theory crisis to epic proportions. She promised to have a list of the guilty on her desk. She had no list, and before long, no desk, either.
Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman from Honolulu, became the first female director of national security, even though her sole qualification appears to be flying back and forth between Hawaii and the mainland. Hawaii, you see, used to be a separate country. Her incompetence, at first a rumor, was confirmed once she took office.
Lindsey Halligan, a former beauty queen, was brought in to prosecute Trump tormentors James Comey and Letitia James. But before she could wreak havoc on the James gang, her own appointment process as a prosecutor proved to be defective. And out of the mix she went.
And then there’s former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose brief Cabinet stint spontaneously combusted over allegations of inappropriate personal behavior involving both her and her husband.
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Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making light of the common denominator among these individuals who strutted and fretted briefly on the national stage. Instead, I’m wondering if the president could put his well-known taste for attractive women aside as he replaces White House, Cabinet, and prosecutorial figures during the remainder of his term.
To be fair, it’s not just good-looking women who catch the president’s eye. The telegenic presence of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and War Secretary Pete Hegseth captured the president’s fancy and was a factor in their selection. The president‘s willingness to place large numbers of women in positions of authority is admirable. I just wish he could recognize that qualifications, unlike beauty, are more than skin deep.
Michael Levin is a two-time New York Times bestselling author. His next novel, 2028, A Political Thriller, will be published by Morgan James in April 2027.