Susie Wiles is the latest woman to take the fall for Trump’s failures

Susie Wiles is out. She can now officially join the long line of women used as human shields for the sickest, most depraved administration made up of corrupt, abusive, and deeply troubled men still trying to play dress-up as actual statesmen who care about the American people. They don’t. That’s why they were all voted into oblivion earlier this week.

Every time there’s a much larger, much more problematic scandal in Trump II, a woman with a far lesser scandal or offense is put very publicly on the chopping block. Burn the witches indeed!

Pam Bondi, the erstwhile attorney general, was consumed by the Epstein files controversy — files she’s not in, but her former boss sure is. Dogkiller Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was brought down amid ICE and spending scandals. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Labor secretary, was facing misconduct allegations. Tulsi Gabbard, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Karoline Leavitt, Katie Zacharia, Susan Monarez, Carla Hayden...

Different women, different days, same shit. And boy are they leaving behind a big, terrible pile of shit.

Following Wiles, we now have human turd Stephen Miller stepping in as White House chief of staff. The final Bowser of the human sewer known as the White House. A man so rancid I imagine flies die if they land on him. A man so self-hateful he doesn’t mind aligning with actual neo-Nazis, regardless of his Jewish heritage.

We have JD Vance, a man so repugnant he's managed to turn someone else's losing campaign into the death rattle of his own political career. When Vivek Ramaswamy ran an attack ad featuring the estranged mother of now Ohio Governor-elect Amy Acton, accusing her daughter of lying about her childhood, he conveniently left out why they were estranged: Acton had been removed from her mother's custody after her stepfather was indicted for raping her when she was 12. Acton called the ad hideous and exploitative. Even Republican Governor Mike DeWine condemned it. But Vance? Vance praised Ramaswamy's "audacity" and told Republicans appalled by the ad to "stop whining." And when Acton went on to win the governorship, Ramaswamy lost an election, while Vance was left owning a defense of the indefensible.

This is the same asshole who for years has been coming for the legacy of a Black feminist icon. In 2012, the legendary bell hooks published Appalachian Elegy, four years before Vance gave us Hillbilly Elegy. In 2002, she published Communion, only for Vance to announce a book of the very same name in 2026. What better way to bury the work of one of America's most important Black thinkers than to flood the literary landscape and search engines with the name of a powerful white man? It's whitewashing for the algorithmic age, where a Black woman does the intellectual heavy lifting and a white man gets to erase the original conversation. bell hooks spent her life challenging the systems that erase Black women. Now Vance is helping demonstrate exactly how those systems work.

For now, we also still have alleged alcohol abuser Pete Hegseth. A man so awful, his own mother sent him a note denouncing him for his treatment of women. A man so inept at being his actual version of a man, every time he posts a video of himself working out, the internet is flooded with personal trainers ripping him to shreds for struggling to do three consecutive pull-ups. A man who looks so zooted out, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his teeth fall out on national TV. A real slave to the grind.

We have Marco Rubio and a man named Markwayne. And many, many more pathetic, hateful, small little men trying to prove how big they are to the world. Men like Kash Patel, who is so scandal-ridden, the Pentagon itself leaks stories about his horrendous behavior on a weekly basis. The Pentagon actively refuses to keep his secrets. That’s how bad he is. That’s how bad they all are. But they all get to stay put. Why? I guess because they are men, however pathetic they may be.

And don’t get me wrong. The women are no saints. At this point, it’s just funny to watch this administration surgically excise a top-ranking woman every time something awful happens. Women for Trump indeed!

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.

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