As last week got underway, one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisers, Dan Caldwell, was escorted from the Pentagon. Soon after, Darin Selnick, another top member of Hegseth’s team was out, too.

The same day, nearly every member of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service — described as the department’s “fast-track tech development arm” — announced that they’re resigning. Soon after, Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was also removed from the Pentagon.

As the week progressed, so too did the turmoil. Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff, wasn’t fired, but he was reassigned to a different role in the department. Around the same time, John Ullyot, the Pentagon’s former top spokesperson, was also asked to resign.

As the week came to an end, three of those who were ousted — Caldwell, Carroll and Selnick — issued a joint statement explaining that they were “incredibly disappointed” by how their service at the Pentagon ended, adding that “unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks.”

And just when it seemed things couldn’t get much worse, they got worse. NBC News reported:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used his personal phone to send information about U.S. military operations in Yemen to a 13-person Signal group chat, including his wife and his brother, two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed to NBC News. He did so after an aide had warned him to be careful not to share sensitive information on an unsecure communications system before the Yemen operation, the sources said.

These allegations, of course, come on the heels of Hegseth’s prominent role in last month’s Signal chat scandal — the controversy some have labeled “Signalgate” — that’s currently under investigation by the Department of Defense’s inspector general’s office. (Hegseth continues to deny allegations that he shared classified information through unsecured channels. The White House echoed the denial.)

“You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that pedaled the Russia hoax,” Hegseth told reporters at the White House on Monday when asked about the latest revelations. He added: “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me.”

The New York Times was first to report on the existence of the second Signal chat, and it relied on four Pentagon sources — reinforcing the point that there are some key figures in the Pentagon who aren’t just aware of Hegseth’s failures and abuses, but who are also letting journalists know about his failures and abuses.

But wait, there’s more. As the public learned of these new allegations, Ullyot, who had been a top spokesman at the Defense Department before he left his job there last week, wrote a devastating piece for Politico describing the “total chaos” and “full-blown meltdown” at the Pentagon.

“The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Ullyot wrote. “The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.”

Ullyot, who worked on Donald Trump’s campaign and held prominent posts in the president’s first term, added, “President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”

Hegseth’s tenure as the secretary of defense was already a disaster before the Signal chat scandal broke last month, but conditions are spectacularly worse now.

In a normal and healthy political environment, Hegseth would have no choice at this point but to start writing his resignation letter and putting his belongings in a cardboard box. Then again, in a normal and healthy political environment, a president wouldn’t have nominated a manifestly unqualified, scandal-plagued television personality to lead the Defense Department, and in a normal and healthy political environment, his nomination would’ve received zero confirmation votes in the Senate.

Indeed, as the chaos intensifies at the Pentagon, I find myself looking anew at the roll call on Hegseth’s confirmation, when 50 Republican senators put aside everything they knew about the nominee and put him in an incredibly important and challenging position. As the scandal mounts, they bear as much responsibility as anyone.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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In recent weeks, there’s been an air of mystery surrounding Donald Trump announcing a 90-day “pause” to much of his agenda on trade tariffs. Literally one day earlier, the White House insisted that the president wasn’t even considering such a move, and that declaration followed Trump himself declaring that his tariffs were “here to stay” and would “never change.”

It was against this backdrop that The Wall Street Journal reported on some striking behind-the-scenes details on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick circumventing Peter Navarro when he briefly stopped hovering around the Oval Office and went to a meeting elsewhere in the White House.

It was at that point, the Journal reported, based on multiple sources, that the Cabinet secretaries “made their move.”

They rushed to the Oval Office to see Trump and propose a pause on some of the tariffs—without Navarro there to argue or push back. They knew they had a tight window. The meeting with Bessent and Lutnick wasn’t on Trump’s schedule. The two men convinced Trump of the strategy to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets. They stayed until Trump tapped out a Truth Social post, which surprised Navarro, according to one of the people familiar with the episode.

The reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, and the article is filled with a variety of quotes from spokespersons representing Bessent, Lutnick, Navarro and the White House, who downplayed allegations of internal divisions.

Nevertheless, if the Journal’s account is accurate, it tells us quite a bit about conditions inside the Trump administration.

For one thing, functional White Houses are not supposed to work this way, with Cabinet secretaries quietly scheming to work around a misguided anti-trade trade adviser. For another, if the Journal’s report is correct, it reflects an implicit acknowledgement that Trump has no real understanding of his own policy agenda, which in turn creates an environment in which Cabinet secretaries, confident in the knowledge that the president will agree with the last person he spoke to, have to engage in skullduggery to prevent global economic ruin.

But just as important, if not more so, is the emerging and deepening fissures within Trump’s team. It would appear, for example, that Bessent and Lutnick have linked arms, and they see Navarro as an internal rival.

But this is hardly the only relevant crack. Elon Musk has also clashed with Navarro, with the former calling the latter a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Meanwhile, Bessent and Musk are also apparently on opposing sides. So are Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as Rubio and the West Wing.

Throughout American history, there have been administrations with rival factions, but those divisions usually take time. On Team Trump, the cracks are bursting into view just three months after Inauguration Day.

In theory, a strong president could intervene, resolve differences, unite his or her own team and establish a clear vision for his or administration to follow. In practice, however, Trump appears content to play the role of President Bystander, watching these divisions get even worse.