Last week, buried under a deluge of reports about President Trump’s upcoming summit in Alaska, something amazing happened. That was the nearly unprecedented un-resignation of Dr. Vinay Prasad, chief medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration. Prasad, a biostatistician of high standing in the medical community and one of the brightest minds behind Trump’s efforts to reform the vaccine approval process, had resigned from his post about a week earlier. At the time, his resignation was notable for its abruptness, for the fact that it happened amid a second Trump administration that has thus far done a good job of limiting turnover, and for the fact that it was totally unnecessary.
It’s a great formula for Trump’s backers, and a frustrating one for his foes.
The apparent trigger of Prasad’s resignation was a campaign waged on X by conservative influencer Laura Loomer, who exhumed a series of Prasad’s past social media posts in which he described himself as a Bernie Sanders liberal. Even though Prasad’s portfolio in the administration is limited to vaccine and drug approvals, issues on which he is in lockstep with the president and arguably one of the most qualified people to implement his agenda, Loomer argued that those 2021 and 2022 posts disqualified him from working in the administration.
Some, including medical journalist Alex Berenson, noted that Loomer’s out-of-the-blue smear campaign seemed to follow suspiciously close on the heels of Prasad’s order that influential pharmaceutical company Sarepta Therapeutics stop shipping its flagship muscular dystrophy drug on grounds of unconvincing clinical results.
According to reporting by Politico, Trump asked Prasad to return to work after heavy lobbying from FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Though Prasad’s ordeal was unusual in its drama, it becomes the latest data point in an encouraging trend within the second Trump term — a trend which distinguishes it from all other recent administrations, and most notably, from Trump’s first. That is its near-total rejection of the heckler’s veto. Indeed, there is no recent presidential administration that has delivered so few scalps to a public (and media) so hungry for them.
The furor over Trump’s decision not to release further information on financier and convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein is a case in point. Divisive among Trump’s base, the Epstein issue seemed tailor-made to break the Trump presidency apart. Belatedly discovering the Epstein story as a means to sow chaos in the administration, legacy press outlets joined conservative media in accusing Trump — who had previously called for further investigation of Epstein — of hypocrisy.
Amplified by outlets such as Newsweek, petitions calling for the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi gained tens of thousands of signatures. Reports circulated claiming that FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino (both Epstein ‘truthers’) were furious with Trump and were considering resigning. The reports seemed almost to dare the president to be so soft as to tolerate such insubordination.
In the end, Trump made his decision on who needed to take the fall: nobody. In his judgment, the Epstein story was a distraction, all the officials concerned were doing their jobs well, and it wasn’t worth wasting good staff on an imbroglio caused by his own U-turn. A month later, the clamor over Epstein has abated, and Bondi, Patel, and Bongino are all still employed.
Another example of Trump’s new tack of safeguarding his administration’s human capital is his seeming indifference to allegations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is mismanaging the Pentagon. Two weeks ago, a headline in Politico asked: “Trump 2.0 Doesn’t Like Drama. So Why’s He Swallowing So Many Bad Headlines About Hegseth?” Politico is only confused because the question is framed incorrectly. Trump 2.0’s aversion to drama is internal; indeed, the administration seems willing to weather or ignore just about any media firestorm. The only drama it worries about is that which distracts from the president’s agenda.
When it comes to the Pentagon, that agenda seems to be to upset the applecart of military leadership by superannuated armchair generals and replace it with leadership by young men in the field with an “America First” perspective. Is the fractiousness within Hegseth’s Pentagon a distraction from that agenda or evidence that it’s being implemented? In Trump’s view, clearly the latter.
And then there’s “Signalgate” — the encrypted chat heard round the world, in which Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz discussed classified Ukraine strike plans in a private chat that included a journalist. Trump, in a measured response to the public clamor, demoted Waltz to U.N. representative, but collected no scalps for the oversight.
And that, with the partial exception of Elon Musk’s departure from the Department of Government Efficiency (partial since Musk was a volunteer who was bound to return to his businesses eventually), has been the theme of the second Trump administration. To hire purposefully and fire only when the administration’s agenda is no longer being served, whatever anyone on the outside has to say. It’s a great formula for Trump’s backers, and a frustrating one for his foes. But it’s hard to argue that the elimination of the heckler’s veto from our executive politics is anything other than a long-term boon for our political system.
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