Jennifer Siebel Newsom said President Donald Trump’s firings of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were no surprise, and she cast the moves as part of a wider war on all women. In a Saturday Instagram video, the California first partner said the removal of two women who had been handpicked by Trump fit a pattern she has seen before.
Siebel Newsom said she was no fan of Bondi or Noem, but argued that Trump’s treatment of them mattered beyond the two women themselves. “There's a familiar pattern here,” she said, adding that conservative women elevated by Trump are brought in, “packaged Mar-a-Lago style,” and lifted up only so long as they serve “the patriarch at the top.”
Bondi was fired as Trump’s attorney general last week after bipartisan outrage over her handling of investigations into Jeffrey Epstein and the release of millions of files tied to him. Trump announced her departure on Thursday and praised her as a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend,” even as he has also complained that the Justice Department failed to prosecute his political enemies after he demanded their imprisonment. Cases against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James later fell apart in court.
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Noem was removed from the Department of Homeland Security last month after saying Trump had signed off on a multi-million-dollar deportation campaign in which she featured prominently. Trump denied ever signing off on it and later announced on Truth Social that he was removing her from the department. In 2025, Trump had said at a Women’s History Month event that he was thrilled to say his Cabinet had more women than any Republican president in the country’s history.
Siebel Newsom, who is married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom and often uses the title California’s first partner, said women aligned with a leader who has publicly devalued women will be the first to go. “When you align yourself with that value system, with a leader who has publicly devalued women, degraded them, and been found liable of abusing women,” she said, “Well, guess what? You're going to be the first to go.” She added that “no woman is safe in Trump's Republican Party unless she has enough wealth or the ability to buy her own job security and safety.”
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The contrast is hard to miss: Trump has pointed to the size of his female ranks as proof of inclusion, while Siebel Newsom says those appointments are conditional and disposable. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, one-third of Trump’s original Cabinet and Cabinet-level appointments were women. Her argument is that the numbers never changed the power structure behind them.
That is the point she made on Saturday, and it answers the question raised by the firings themselves. In her view, Bondi and Noem were not exceptions to Trump’s politics of power; they were evidence of it.
