The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump Goes on a Firing Spree || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Just because Trump is finally purging some of his administration doesn't mean that the problems are going away. The core issue still exists: Trump prioritizes loyalty and praise over competency and experience. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4bWT41Z

You're jamming your favorite song, and while you aren't missing a beat, you could be missing a signal from your body. It's an SOS from your kidneys, and it doesn't sound like music at all. It's silent. High blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and other risk factors can quietly stress the kidneys, leading to negative impacts on the heart. That's what you should ask your doctor about a simple urine test called UACR. Most missed the signal for hidden kidney disease and related heart risk. You shouldn't. Visit DetecttheS.com today to learn more. Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. A lot of people on the Patreon page have asked me what I think of the recent firings by Donald Trump of a couple of his cabinet members.

At Department Homeland Security, Christy Knoem is now gone and has been basically put into a pointless position to oversee a summit that will probably never happen again. And Pam Bondi, the former Attorney General now, is also gone. And so the question is, is this the start of a general bloodletting? You know, let me start with simple stuff. Trump is erratic, so I don't really know. But let me underline that it really doesn't matter. The president chooses co-leaders based on his own interests and his own style. And we have learned over the past five years that Trump does not want advice.

He wants worship. So if you go back to Trump won, he really did not expect that he was going to win. So the Republican Party, specifically the former governor of Oklahoma, helped him staff out the government with people from throughout the Republican establishment. And so he came in with a lot of people that he personally knew or trusted, and he proceeded to almost fire all of them

during the course of his first administration. He actually cycled through more cabinet secretaries than any other three American presidents in history. What we discovered was that whenever somebody was in the room who offered him good advice, that was usually because they had studied the topic and knew something about it, and that made him feel like he wasn't the smartest person

in the conversation. So when he was out of power, he took over the Republican institution, the party itself, and purged it of the research arm and the recruitment arm so that that net could never happen again. So when he came in for his second term, there was no longer a pool of talent to draw from. In fact, the Republican Party no longer has a pool of talent to draw from. And so he installed people who would tell him what he wants to hear, or, to be perfectly blunt, just praise him without any reason. And that is the bulk of the cabinet today.

And if you look at the senior leadership throughout the government, we still have over a thousand positions that haven't been filled. Things like, say, the impasseur to Russia or the surgeon general. This is as much by design as anything else. So when you're hoping that he'll fire somebody in the cabinet who isn't any good at their job, keep in mind that they weren't picked because they would be good at their job. They were picked because they couldn't be good at their job. And any replacement's going to fall into the same bucket. So let's go through the candidates that everyone's talking about that are likely to get fired.

I don't know if they're going to be, but they're on the list. First up is at Commerce, Howard Lutnik. Now, I have spoken to no one who is in the financial world in New York, who has said anything other than he was the most corrupt person in New York. And so they all thought he would be a perfect fit for Trump at Commerce. And it sounds like that's exactly what's gone down. The Trump policy when it comes to tariff is incredibly erratic. We have now had over 7,000 changes to tariff policy.

So businesses within the United States just don't. know what the rules of the game are, and we've seen industrial construction spending steadily drop for the 14 months of the Trump presidency so far, to the point now that if you remove data center construction, we're actually below where we were for new builds during COVID of all times. It's getting very, very bad. But for Lutnik, this is an opportunity. What it seems to be happening is his family is selling access to Lutnik specifically at commerce, and Lutnik is selling his personal access in order to get people exemptions on the tariff list. So a remarkably corrupt setup. Trump knows this. Trump has no problem with this. Trump's problem with Lutnik is that

apparently the Lutnik family was very tight with the Epstein group years ago. And so that has prevented the Epstein issue from fading into the ether. So if Lutnik is going to be fired, it's not because he's doing a horrible job at Congress and crushing American economic activity and becoming rich in the process, it'll be because of child molestation, apparently, or something like that. I really try not to follow up. Okay, next up, RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services. This guy is a full-on nutbag. This is the guy who is making up studies in order to say that vaccines shouldn't be part of our system.

This is the guy that says that the way to fix heart disease is to double your consumption of beef ptollow. I mean, he is certifiable, and he's undoubtedly causing massive damage to American health long term, because decisions that are made by parents now when your kids are young are going to affect their health their entire life, and this is grossly going in the wrong direction. Trump has no problem with that. What Trump has a problem with is that RFK is sucking up a lot of the oxygen in the room, and the Maha group, they call themselves, make America healthy again, is now starting to split with the president because Trump just keeps.

can't stand sharing the stage. It's a PR issue. I mentioned that the surge in general still hasn't been filled. It's been 14 months. It's one of the most important jobs in the government. And the only person who has been appointed so far is a literal quack. Okay, moving on, my personal favorite, Tulsi Gabbard. If she's not a Russian agent, she clearly aspires to be one. She has had an anti-American position on every foreign policy question for the last 20 years. And, now she's in a position where she aggregates all of the intelligence that comes in from all of the bureaus and departments and provides the president with a daily brief. And she, of course, aggressively edits that so the president can't possibly be informed. Most of the positions

she's taken so far in the administration have been purely pro-Russian, designed to denigrate American power. But that is not the problem that Donald Trump has with her. The problem that he has is that she doesn't support the war in Iran. And so she actually testified to Congress, one of the few true things she's ever said, that there is no evidence that Iran was actively developing a bomb in a way that was any closer to they had been over the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years. True, Trump didn't like hearing that. So now he's talking about getting rid of her. Next up, Cash Patel at the FBI. Patel is, he's one of the candidates for one of the stupidest people in the administration. He has no experience in law enforcement, just like Tulsi Gabbard,

no experience in intelligence or management. And he's a conspiracy theorist. And he came in basically knowing nothing about the job. And one of the first things that he did is remove people from counterterror investigations, kidnapping investigations, nuclear theft investigations, and sent them to Home Depot to arrest day laborers. He has wrecked the training system for the FBI. He's done incalculable damage to American law enforcement long term at the federal level.

Trump is aware of all these things. he has no problem with any of these things. His problem with Cash Patel is that he has proven so incompetent that he can't prosecute Donald Trump's political foes. Now, this is an impossible ask because Trump accuses his foes of doing things that they just haven't done. And I realize that there's some people in Mega that are going to scream at that, but tough. No facts whatsoever have ever been presented that Trump lost the last election or that Trump doesn't get along very well with the Russians. This is the same reason that Pam Bondi was ultimately dismissed

because she realized that there was no relevance to these cases, and so she slow walked them and only prosecuted them in order to stay in Trump's good graces. Cash Patel is basically in the same bucket. And if this is how Trump defines the success, he will never be satisfied with anyone who is FBI director or attorney general. competing with Cash Patel for the dumbest person in the administration is Pete Hegeseth at defense.

The guy who during his confirmation hearing proudly proclaimed that he would be the least qualified defense secretary in American history. And wow, he was right. He still hasn't appointed a chief of staff. So he's still not even capable of scheduling a meeting among the joint chiefs without using their staff, much less the rest of the defense department. He's gone through and he's wrecked some of the academy work. He's certainly interfered with mid-career training. He's interfered with the promotion process to make sure that no women or minorities are promoted. And as a result, he's come into clashes with others of the senior staff within the defense department.

The big things that's happened in the last few weeks is that the Army Chief of Staff was fired because he objected to what Heggseth was doing with the promotions program. The chief chaplain was fired because the chaplain thing. that got really, God, this is so awful. The chaplain believes that soldiers should have a relationship with their spiritual side, whatever that happens to be, and Trump's like, unless you're going to be a crusader, fuck off. We're now at the point that the Pope and the Archbishop of Military Services are now taking some pretty strong stances against Hegseff personally, and Hegsteth is using crusader language to justify the war in Iran, but having absolutely nothing to do with the

manage of the conflict itself. Trump knows all of this, has no problems with any of it, but Trump realizes in his heart of heart that the Iran war is not going nearly as well as he would like, and Pete Hegseth has now manifested himself as a potential scapegoat. So a couple of the firings that Hegseth did over the last week were potential competitors for his job, and so he fired them preemptively. Now, the point of all of this is that it's not that these people should be fired. Of course they should all be fired. They should have never been selected in the first place. They certainly should have never been confirmed by the Senate, but they have been. And if Trump fires all of them, there is zero expectation that will get anyone better. I make part of my living by

being a conference speaker. So I go around the country talking about geopolitics and economics and where it takes the people in the room. And I try to stick around to see the other speakers. And typically you're going to have a couple of economists and a couple of political speakers, and when you bring in a political speaker, they always try to get someone from both sides. That has collapsed in the last year. What we've discovered is that there is no one in the business community, or like academia, or in security studies, that believes anything that Donald Trump is doing. There is no cadre out there for MAGA that is rooted in anything real.

It's just ideology. So I have not been to an event in the last year where anyone has spoken on behalf of the MAGA movement unless it's been a direct representative from the administration itself. And most of those guys clearly don't know what they're talking about. What has evolved over the last 14 months is that the business community has kind of gotten fed up what that's going on and is starting to change its mind. The business community has been a core part of the Republican Coalition going back to the last reformation of the Republican Party during the Depression.

And now they realize it's finally sinking in that they've been kicked out of the coalition and they're only now starting to kind of tack. That's kind of piece one of all of this is that we're seeing people who have always thought of themselves as Republican realizing that they're just not anymore. The second piece is if Trump decides to fire these people, he then is supposed to replace them, but there are no candidates that are more competent than the incompetent people that he would be letting go. And what has changed in part because of the business community is there are a handful of Republican senators who have kind of woken up to the danger that Donald Trump is not just to the country but to the party

and therefore their own personal futures. It's a little late to the game, but we haven't seen any meaningful movement on Trump's appointees confirmation for months now. And so if we get a new defense secretary, a new attorney, a new attorney, attorney general, new FBI director, somebody knew at HHS. Let's say it's a clean sweep. The candidates aren't going to be any better. And the willingness of Congress to give him a second chance to run with people who were chosen because they were incompetent is pretty low. So we're more likely to see more problems at the White House, more inconsistencies, more incompetence. And if you look back in the last several months, oh my God, the bar is already really high.

But if you look at how Trump has been reacting in public since the Iran war started, you can see he's very clearly losing his grip and getting frustrated. And the fact that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is probably the most competent person in the cabinet, is suffering, unfortunately, from breast cancer and so hasn't been able to put in the time. She has always been kind of the Trump whisperer. And with her in a reduced role, there's nothing left between Trump and the rest of the world.

and that is starting to really show. I'd call it a failed presidency, but we were already there. We're now looking at something worse. An old guy who is really frustrated, who has started a lot of problems he can't solve even with a good team who has no team at all. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. You're jamming your favorite song,

and while you aren't missing a beat, you could be missing a signal from your body. It's an SOS from your kidneys, and it doesn't sound like music at all. It's silent. High blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and other risk factors can quietly stress the kidneys leading to negative impacts on the heart.

That's what you should ask your doctor about a simple urine test called UACR. Most missed the signal for hidden kidney disease and related heart risk. You shouldn't. Visit Detect thesos.com today to learn more.