The Glass Cliff, One Year Later: Who Fell, Who's Holding On, and What Pam Bondi's Ouster Tells Us About Power

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It has been a little over a year since eight women were appointed to Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions in the Trump administration — more than any Republican presidency in history. At the time, we wrote about what that headline obscured. We introduced the concept of the glass cliff: the documented phenomenon in which women are disproportionately elevated to leadership positions during periods of crisis, handed authority over institutions already in free fall, and then held personally responsible when the fall continues.

We said to watch the terrain, not just the headline.

One year later, the terrain has spoken.

Two women have already been removed. A third is on the verge of being pushed out as of this writing. A fourth never made it to the job she was promised. And the remaining four are navigating portfolios defined by institutional fragility, contradictory mandates, and the specific kind of visibility that comes without protection.

This is not a post-mortem. It is a status report. And the pattern it reveals is as clear as it is instructive.

A Quick Reminder: What the Glass Cliff Actually Is

The glass cliff was identified in 2005 by British psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam. Their original research found that companies appointing women to their boards were more likely to have experienced sustained poor financial performance in the months prior — women weren't causing the decline, they were being handed the wheel after it had already begun.

Subsequent research expanded the concept beyond corporate boardrooms to government, academia, and politics. A landmark study confirmed that both white women and people of color were significantly more likely than white men to be elevated to leadership at weakly performing organizations — and when those organizations continued to decline, these leaders were disproportionately replaced by white men. The researchers called this dynamic "the savior effect."

The glass cliff does not require conspiracy. It operates through existing biases, organizational inertia, and a well-documented tendency to see women as natural "damage control" leaders — communal, empathetic, symbolic of change — precisely when any leader would struggle. The opportunity is real. The structural conditions are often quietly engineered for failure.

For the full breakdown of the theory and its application to the Trump Cabinet, read our original piece here: The Edge of Power: The Glass Cliff Theory and the Women of the Trump Administration

Now let's talk about where everyone stands.

THE FALLEN

Pam Bondi — Attorney General

Status: Removal imminent. Replacement candidate: Lee Zeldin.

Bondi is the most recent woman in this administration to fall — and her arc is the one that has crystallized most sharply in the past 48 hours.

She was never the first choice. She was the contingency. Trump's original pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew after a congressional ethics investigation threatened to derail his confirmation before it began. Bondi stepped in to lead a Justice Department that was already polarized, already under siege, and already carrying the weight of expectations no institutional framework could actually support.

Her mandate was, in the plainest terms, structurally impossible. She was asked to serve both as the nation's top law enforcement officer — with all the institutional norms, judicial oversight, and constitutional constraints that role entails — and as a political weapon pointed at the president's perceived enemies. Those two roles cannot coexist in a federal court system that keeps saying no.

And the court system kept saying no. Her department secured indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both were thrown out after a judge ruled the appointing prosecutor was illegally serving. Probes into Democratic senators, Federal Reserve officials, and congressional members have stalled or collapsed. Efforts to subpoena Jerome Powell were quashed. A grand jury unanimously rejected criminal charges against lawmakers.

These are not personal failures. These are the system functioning as designed — rejecting the mission itself. But the administration has framed them as Bondi's failures of aggressiveness and effectiveness.

The Epstein files became the breaking point. In a February 2025 Fox News interview, Bondi said an Epstein client list was "sitting on my desk right now to review," only for the DOJ to later assert no such list existed. She clarified she was referring to the broader investigative paperwork — but the damage to her credibility with Trump's base was done. The frustration inside the administration had been building since January. Then Susie Wiles — her own colleague, the White House Chief of Staff — told Vanity Fair that Bondi had "completely whiffed" on the Epstein files. That is a public execution dressed in professional language.

Multiple sources now confirm Trump has told Bondi directly, in what was described as a "tough" conversation, that she will be replaced in the near future. She has been told she will be given another job. The likely replacement is EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin — a man with no prosecutorial background — who will be brought in to do what Bondi supposedly couldn't: deliver retribution.

The double bind is visible in every detail of this story. Bondi was criticized as too restrained. She was publicly undermined by a colleague. She was handed prosecutions that the judiciary rejected and blamed for not winning them. She absorbed the optics of a politicized DOJ while being faulted for failing to fully politicize it. There was no version of this role in which success was structurally available to her.

That is the glass cliff. That is what it looks like when it completes.

Kristi Noem — Secretary of Homeland Security

Status: Removed. Reassigned to "Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas."

Noem's glass cliff arc was the first to complete its full cycle, and we documented it in real time. She inherited the Department of Homeland Security — a department that had cycled through five secretaries in Trump's first term alone — and was tasked with executing the most aggressive immigration enforcement agenda in modern American history. She oversaw mass deportation operations, record drug interdictions, and a 670,000-person formal removal figure her supporters cite as proof of success.

It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough. Because the glass cliff is never just about outputs.

The proximate cause of her removal was a $220 million DHS advertising campaign featuring her on horseback at Mount Rushmore. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee the president had approved it. The White House publicly denied it. Within hours, she was out. But the administration's list of grievances was longer: the Minneapolis immigration operations during which two Americans were killed by federal agents, her selection of Corey Lewandowski for an advisory role, and a general pattern characterized — by her own administration — as "a culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures."

Leadership failures. Said by the administration that handed her the most contested, litigated, and politically volatile portfolio in the Cabinet.

Her replacement? Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma — a former MMA fighter and plumber with an associate's degree in Construction Technology and zero experience in national security, federal law enforcement, or immigration policy. He was described by Senator Lindsey Graham as "one of the most prepared people" for the role.

The savior had arrived. The woman was reassigned to a newly created diplomatic initiative with a sweeping mandate and no clear operational authority. A second cliff, dressed in different language.

For the full breakdown of Noem's arc, read: She Fell. Now She's the Shield. The Kristi Noem Glass Cliff Just Got a Second Act.

THE ONE WHO NEVER GOT THERE

Elise Stefanik — Nominated as UN Ambassador

Status: Nomination withdrawn. Returned to Congress.

Stefanik's glass cliff story is the one that broke before it even began — which is, in its own way, revealing.

She was nominated as Trump's ambassador to the United Nations in November 2024, gave up her House leadership position, attended a Cabinet meeting, conducted what local media called a "farewell tour" of her New York district, and waited. For months. Her confirmation had cleared committee but sat in procedural purgatory as House Republicans feared losing her vote on a razor-thin majority.

In March 2025, Trump pulled her nomination entirely. "I don't want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise's seat," he wrote. The message was plain: she was more valuable as a tool to protect his legislative margins than as a diplomat at the United Nations. Her value was instrumental. Her role was transferable.

She returned to the House without her former leadership post, without committee assignments she had held for a decade, and without a clear institutional home. Johnson promised her a seat at the leadership table "immediately." The details of what that meant have remained conspicuously vague.

Stefanik's story doesn't follow the standard glass cliff arc — she was never placed in the precarious role, she was simply denied it when the political calculus shifted. But it illuminates something the glass cliff framework asks us to consider: what happens when the promise of leadership is itself contingent on its usefulness to others? She didn't fall off the cliff. She was held at the edge and then called back when she was needed for something else.

THE ONES STILL STANDING — AND WHAT THAT COSTS

Tulsi Gabbard — Director of National Intelligence

Status: Still in role. Under mounting pressure.

Gabbard arrived at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with no prior intelligence experience and the mandate to oversee the coordination of 17 intelligence agencies during one of the most geopolitically volatile periods in decades. She was handed an institution that was already undergoing political purges and structural overhaul.

Her tenure has been marked by continuous turbulence. She was among the officials included in the Signal group chat that inadvertently exposed sensitive military planning to a journalist — a controversy that generated serious institutional fallout. She was publicly sidelined from planning for the administration's military operations in Venezuela, with White House aides reportedly joking that her title DNI stood for "Do Not Invite." She was present at an FBI raid on a Georgia election office in a move that former DNI officials called entirely outside the scope of the role. A Republican senator publicly suggested she needed to "change her meds" after a strange video release.

Now, as of this week, Trump is reportedly considering whether to fire her as well — frustrated that she declined to condemn a former deputy who publicly undercut the administration's rationale for its Iran operations. There is no clear replacement candidate identified, which may be the only thing keeping her in the role.

Gabbard has delivered real institutional output — she released the 2026 National Threat Assessment, announced the largest-ever Intelligence Community cybersecurity modernization effort, and has remained publicly active. But she has done all of it while being excluded from key decisions, publicly questioned by her own principal, and perpetually speculated about in terms of imminent removal.

Visibility without protection. Authority without institutional backing. The texture of the glass cliff, in real time.

Linda McMahon — Secretary of Education

Status: Still in role. Leading the elimination of her own department.

McMahon was handed, from the first day, what we described in our original piece as the most structurally absurd glass cliff appointment of the group: she was placed in charge of an agency her own administration has publicly and repeatedly stated it wants to eliminate.

A year later, she is delivering. The department has been cut to half its original workforce. Its headquarters building — occupied for more than 45 years — is being vacated, with the Energy Department taking over the lease in August. Student loan management is being transferred to the Treasury Department. Programs overseeing family engagement, low-income school funding, and teacher training have been farmed out to other agencies through nine separate interagency agreements.

McMahon describes all of this as progress. She has called herself the "final Secretary of Education." She is, by her own framing, succeeding at managing the institutional extinction event she was given to manage.

But the glass cliff framework asks a harder question: what does success mean when your mandate is self-erasure? McMahon is dismantling the agency she leads, piece by piece, while the legal challenges pile up, Congress increases the department's budget despite the administration's wishes, and the humans affected — students, borrowers, teachers, families — absorb the consequences of decisions being made faster than anyone can track them.

She is protected, for now, by the fact that elimination is the goal. There is no version of failure available to her as long as the dismantling continues. But there is also no version of legacy, no version of institution-building, no version of durable impact. She was handed the wheel specifically to drive the car off the road. That is a different kind of glass cliff — one where falling is the plan.

Kelly Loeffler — Small Business Administration Administrator

Status: Still in role. Relatively stable.

Loeffler has had the quietest tenure of the group — which is not nothing. The SBA is a genuine agency with real constituencies and real work: billions in loans, regulatory support, and counseling for small businesses that are the backbone of the American economy.

She was Trump's second choice for her current role — initially considered for Agriculture Secretary before that position went to Brooke Rollins. She was also passed over for her Georgia Senate seat in 2020 in a special election she lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock.

The SBA is not, structurally, a glass cliff appointment in the way DHS or DOJ are. It is a functional agency with a clear mission. The more interesting question for Loeffler is whether the SBA retains its independence and resources as the administration continues to reshape the federal bureaucracy around it. She has remained active — co-authoring op-eds with Rollins and Zeldin on agricultural policy — and visible in the administration's ecosystem.

For now, she represents the closest thing to a straightforward appointment in this cohort. That may change.

Brooke Rollins — Secretary of Agriculture

Status: Still in role. Active and stable.

Rollins came to Agriculture with arguably the strongest subject-matter alignment of any woman in this Cabinet — she spent years as a domestic policy aide inside the Trump orbit, ran the America First Policy Institute, and was deeply embedded in the policy architecture of the administration's agricultural agenda before she ever took the job.

She has been active: celebrating National Ag Day at USDA headquarters with the largest crowd in years, co-authoring pieces on farmers' rights and trade, and working across agencies on policy implementation. There is no significant reporting suggesting instability in her position.

Rollins's appointment does not fit the glass cliff model in the same way as others in this group. She was a trusted insider given a portfolio aligned with her expertise and network. If there is a critique, it is more structural — that Agriculture is being reshaped by trade wars and tariff volatility that no Secretary fully controls — but that is the condition of the role, not a function of who holds it.

She is, at least for now, standing on firmer ground than most of her colleagues.

Susie Wiles — White House Chief of Staff

Status: Still in role. The clearest exception to the glass cliff pattern.

Wiles was the first woman ever to serve as White House Chief of Staff — and from the beginning, her appointment stood apart from the others. She did not inherit a damaged institution. She was not handed a portfolio defined by crisis or contradiction. She was given the central coordinating role of the entire executive operation, based on demonstrated strategic competence and a track record that includes managing the 2024 presidential campaign to a decisive victory.

She has remained perhaps the most stable figure in the administration — named to Forbes' 2025 list of the World's Most Powerful Women, widely described as one of the shrewdest operatives in modern Republican politics, and consistently regarded as having genuine access and institutional protection at the highest level.

The glass cliff framework has always acknowledged that not every appointment of a woman fits the pattern. Wiles is the clearest exception — and she is instructive precisely because of what makes her different. She came in with structural power, not symbolic power. She was given authority because of what she had already delivered, not because the role was considered too damaged for anyone better-positioned to want.

It is worth noting, though, that even Wiles is not immune to the dynamics her colleagues face. She was the one who publicly said Bondi "completely whiffed." Whether that statement reflected genuine institutional frustration, political calculation, or a managed effort to redirect blame from the White House onto the AG — that is a question the glass cliff makes us ask.

We have to ask, is Wiles a WOW? Women Oppressing Other Women!

What the Scorecard Tells Us

Let's be direct about what we are looking at.

Of the eight women appointed at the start of this administration:

• Two have been removed from their original roles (Noem, Bondi) and replaced by men

• One never made it to the role she was promised (Stefanik), pulled back when she became more useful as a legislative vote

• One is actively under consideration for firing (Gabbard)

• One is managing the elimination of her own department (McMahon)

• Two are stable and performing (Rollins, Loeffler)

• One stands as the genuine exception to the pattern (Wiles)

The researchers who developed the glass cliff theory documented "the savior effect" — the consistent pattern of women being replaced by white men when crisis does not resolve. In this administration, we have now seen it play out twice in under fourteen months. Noem replaced by Mullin. Bondi imminently replaced by Zeldin.

Neither replacement brings meaningfully stronger credentials to the portfolio than the woman they are replacing. Both are being framed as restorations of competence. Both follow the same structural logic: when a woman fails to deliver in an impossible role, a man is brought in to do what she could not.

The glass cliff does not ask us to absolve these women of responsibility for their choices in office. Noem's enforcement record is real. Bondi's handling of the Epstein files is real. What the glass cliff asks us to do is hold those records alongside the structural conditions that shaped them — the impossible mandates, the contradictory expectations, the absence of institutional protection, the public undermining by colleagues — and ask whether any leader, regardless of gender, could have succeeded in the environment these women were handed.

And then ask: why are women so consistently the ones handed it?

The Terrain Hasn't Changed

A year ago, we ended our original piece with a line that still holds: The glass ceiling was the barrier. The glass cliff is what waits on the other side.

The women of the Trump Cabinet broke through a barrier. Several of them were placed on a ledge. Some have fallen. Some are holding on. And the conditions that put them there — the organizational biases, the crisis appointments, the symbolic diversity deployed in service of an administration dismantling the institutional infrastructure meant to produce it — those conditions have not changed.

The car is still on the same road. The drivers keep changing. The road does not.

We will keep watching.

This article is part of an ongoing series on the glass cliff phenomenon and the women of the Trump administration.

Part One: The Edge of Power: The Glass Cliff Theory and the Women of the Trump Administration

Part Two: She Fell. Now She's the Shield. The Kristi Noem Glass Cliff Just Got a Second Act.

Asha Hamilton Universe explores culture, power, and the stories that shape how we live. Read more at ashamiltonuniverse.com.