A prominent House Republican is breaking with President Donald Trump on the state of the U.S. economy — which the president in recent months has called the “hottest” in the world and suggested that the inflation and affordability crises have been resolved. But she’s also placing the blame on former President Joe Biden, well over a year after he left office.

House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain “offered a rare acknowledgment from a GOP leader Tuesday that the U.S. economy might not be in tip-top condition,” Politico reported.

“Now, I know that even with bigger refunds, many families are struggling right now. And I get it,” McClain told reporters.

“But we also owe it to the American people to be honest about how we got here, to make sure we don’t ever go back again. So let me be candid, and let me refresh everybody’s memories,” she said, declaring that the Biden administration “killed” the Keystone Pipeline on “day one.”

The pipeline was never completed — Biden revoked a permit for it.

READ MORE: ‘Dropping Like Flies’: Which of Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries Will Be Next?

“Then,” she continued, “the Biden administration made it harder to ‘drill baby drill.'”

By the time President Biden left office, the U.S. was the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of petroleum products and natural gas.

After praising the Trump administration for opening up more drilling permits, McClain scolded the press: “We need to tell the truth on truly what’s going on.”

“I’m not passing the buck, I’m giving you the facts,” she said.

“It’s crazy that Democrats closed the Keystone pipeline,” she reiterated. “It’s crazy to rely on our enemies for our oil and our natural gas. And it is crazy to sacrifice our national economic security for woke Green New Deal talking points.”

“So, no. Energy prices aren’t where any of us want them to be,” she acknowledged before praising Trump’s energy policies.

READ MORE: ‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

After more than a year with no Cabinet Secretary exits, President Donald Trump has now seen three leave under various circumstances — Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer — in less than two months. The question now is: who might be next?

The Wall Street Journal says Trump’s cabinet secretaries are “dropping like flies,” and Politico reports that high-profile Trump officials are “sweating on their futures.” Politico also notes that the “Cabinet-level calm of the first 13 months of this presidency is over. Trump is in the mood for shaking things up.”

A president with approval ratings currently in the mid-to-upper 30s, Trump is “culling” those who have disappointed or are “distrusted” by his base, Politico writes, with an eye on the midterm elections.

“The campaign is not exactly going swimmingly, and the theory is that problematic members of the administration need clearing out now — still six months from the start of voting — to put sufficient distance between their departures and Election Day.”

The obvious common threads between those out the door — fired, forced, or otherwise leaving — are that all three are women, and were “embroiled in scandal” or distrusted by the base.

Politico suggests two officials who might be next to exit.

FBI Director Kash Patel has been embroiled in scandal and is distrusted by Trump’s base, according to Politico, making him a possible next contender.

“His reputation in MAGA world hasn’t recovered from his role in the initial handling of the Epstein files, while the list of colorful stories (and videos!) about his approach to the job of FBI chief gets longer every month,” Politico notes.

There is also Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has “faced fierce internal criticism from Day One,” and “now has an Epstein-shaped problem of his own.”

“The contrast between how Trump treats the men and the women in his cabinet is notable,” The Bulwark‘s Bill Kristol writes, noting that “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has surely done as much damage to his department and to the nation as Kristi Noem did. But Pete’s still on the job, strutting around and displaying his machismo at the Pentagon.”

Kristol also mentions Secretary Lutnick, who “has profited on a larger scale from the Trump administration than Chavez-DeRemer did. But Lutnick is still there, grifting as men in the Trump orbit do.”

He also points to Director Patel, whom Kristol says is presiding “in all his male adolescent glory as director of the FBI.”

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Do President Donald Trump’s “clownishness” and “lack of ideology” make him less dangerous? A columnist at The Guardian says no.

“Trump’s seeming lack of vision or ideology are misread as attributes that make him somehow less dangerous than the authoritarians of the past who have become the template for what evil looks like,” writes Nesrine Malik. But, “Trump’s presidency is what evil looks like.”

She points to images she remembers from “movies not seen since childhood,” or art and literature, tied together by “kitschy evil.”

She writes that those images seem to be standing in for horrific current events: “the bodies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, a school full of young pupils blown apart in Iran. The more than 1 million people in southern Lebanon expelled en masse from their homes.”

Malik calls it “bewildering” how the “casualness” of the cruelty “has been allowed to pass,” as Donald Trump, who “defies attempts to make his actions cohere with any particular strategy … hovers above the circus of death and chaos.”

Trump and his threats, like those where he threatened “entire civilizations,” are “reshaping the world, but without him even having orchestrated some master plan.”

READ MORE: ‘I’m in Charge!’: Trump Declares ‘I’m Winning a War’ in Series of Wild Rants

Trump “does not adhere to the style or affect of the fascist model,” she argues, “he doesn’t hold rallies, wear uniforms or make fiery speeches from balconies to flag-waving throngs. He hasn’t (entirely yet) overturned the constitution and dismantled democracy.”

“He is an addled comic figure, a man whose very soul is bared in his angry outbursts on social media or in rambling speeches without self-awareness or self-consciousness. He talks about the war on Iran flanked by a gigantic Easter bunny, posts an image of himself as Jesus. He ‘always chickens out‘.”

And yet, Malik asks, “isn’t this what evil is? A projection on to the world not of overbearing and large intent, but smallness and fear?”

Evil creeps up on you, she writes, “because it’s hard for the human brain to encounter evil in ludicrous form, and still recognize it as such.”

“That’s why you ask how such crimes were allowed to happen in the past,” she says.

Composed of “frivolity and nonchalance and fragility, as well as relentlessness and insatiability and brutality,”  evil “rarely arrives with the intent and identifying hallmarks of a villain. It arrives in the form of broken people, whose power lies in their unquenchable desire to make themselves whole no matter the consequences.”

READ MORE: Why a Democratic Senate Takeover Has Become a ‘Real Possibility’: NYT

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