In the months leading up to the disastrous 2006 election, President George W Bush fired his press secretary, Scott McClellan, and withdrew the Supreme Court nomination of his close confidante, Harriet Miers. He waited until after the midterms, in which the Republicans lost control of the United States Congress, to fire Donald Rumsfeld as his secretary of defence, who had led the increasingly unpopular war against Iraq. Last week, President Donald Trump abruptly pulled the plug on Katie Zacharia after she had served just five short days as the White House spokesperson.
Aside from her own dismissal, the biggest news Zacharia delivered was Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ouster from her position as the ambassador to Greece. It is rumoured that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is now on the chopping block, especially after the president rejected his plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, a terrorist who shot 13 people at Fort Hood military base in 2009. Obviously, there are differences between the two presidencies.
McClellan had been the press secretary for three years, not five days. Miers was not embroiled in scandal when her nomination was pulled. The media and the Senate just questioned her qualifications.
And the war with Iran is not as bloody or as costly as the US invasion of Iraq turned out to be. But the second half of the second term of all US presidents can be rocky. In President Ronald Reagan’s second term, his press team dealt with the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal.
In President Bill Clinton’s second term, the Monica Lewinsky affair drove the news. President Richard Nixon faced impeachment in his second term. President Barack Obama had to deal with the scandal surrounding the Benghazi consulate attack in Libya throughout his second term, which also embroiled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Staff turmoil is also not unusual in the White House under any president, especially in the second term and especially when the voters are angry and the polls look dire. Every midterm election is a referendum on the president, and it is not uncommon for the president’s party to be punished at the ballot box. In fact, in 18 of the 20 midterms held over the past 80 years, the governing party has lost seats in Congress.
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