Kristi Noem: A Case Study in the GOP Tilt Toward Ostentatious Fascism
Everywhere you look, there is news that one can scarcely believe is emanating from the United States of America, and I think you know the subject matter to which these news items all refer. In Arizona, a three-year-old child was forced to act as her own lawyer in immigration court, because the nonprofit that would normally provide her defense saw most of its federal funding cut. A Christmas parade on the east side of Santa Barbara was canceled out of fear that ICE agents would crash it. Adelita Grijalva, the new congresswoman from Arizona, said she was pepper sprayed by ICE agents in a Tucson restaurant. The Department of Homeland Security tweeted out a photo of masked and camouflaged agents; it Photoshopped some Santa hats and Christmas-light leis on them and appended the caption: “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME.”
That vile piece of work may or may not have been personally approved by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, but assuming she at least saw it, it surely gave her the warm-and-fuzzies in much the same way that warm dog’s carcass once did. She is a genuinely sick and cruel person. Naturally, in Trumpworld, that typically means you’re in like Flynn. But the last few days have brought some fresh reporting that Noem, against all odds, might be on her way out.
Why? Because she’s been too sadistic even for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller? Please. She’s probably not sadistic enough for Miller. No, the problem appears to be that Trump, depending on who was the last person he spoke to about it, seems to think that Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s longtime, ah … amanuensis, let’s say … has too much power. The Bulwark reporter who advanced this story over the weekend wrote that his sources said it could happen very soon, or that Trump might wait “to let Noem oversee the launch of new enforcement operations planned for January and February.” Gulp.
We would normally welcome this development, except that Trump’s track record has trained us all to dispense with any reaction of automatic relief, because we now know whoever succeeds the Noem-Lewandowski Amphisbaena will be even more ghoulish. As it happens, there is a likely inheritor, at least according to the rumor mill. We’ll circle back to him in a minute. But first, if we are indeed in the twilight of Noem’s public career, we should quickly review it, because she symbolizes and embodies her party’s descent from mere hard-line reactionary conservatism to ostentatious fascism.
Noem got herself elected to the South Dakota House of Representatives in 2006, where she focused on lowering property taxes and expanding gun rights. Four years of that was enough, and in 2010, the big Tea Party year, she made it to Congress. In this age of Barack Obama, she, like so many of her fellow Republicans, became like Groucho’s famous Professor Wagstaff of Horse Feathers: Whatever it was, she was against it. That posture flipped immediately when Trump become president, which isn’t remarkable; if she stood out for anything at the time, it was probably her ferocious opposition to abortion rights. She’s the “no exceptions, not even for rape or incest” type.
She won the governor’s race in 2018 and did two notable things during her tenure. The first was her operatic opposition to the mask mandate. She became a MAGA hero by insisting that the Sturgis motorcycle rally go ahead in August 2020, to blazes with the masks. She and her defenders would like to tell you that everything was just peachy, and while it’s true that thousands didn’t die, academic studies of the event show that hundreds of people in the area contracted Covid who otherwise would not have, and that the whole affair cost South Dakota and the United States $12.2 billion in public health expenditures. But socialism is fine when it’s directed toward manly men who ride hogs.
Then, you’ll recall, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Noem’s South Dakota moved more aggressively than any other state to pass laws restricting abortions that verged on shocking. The state’s law has no rape or incest exceptions and served as a model for several other states.
As Homeland Security secretary, Noem has embraced two of the key elements of fascist rule: grandiose humiliation of the weak Other, and personal corruption that has no point other than to say to everyone: I can do this. The humiliation, we’ve seen time and time again in her infamous photo-ops, notably the one at El Salvador’s CECOT prison, near-naked men huddled behind her and her $50,000 Rolex watch. The corruption is embedded in the two—yes, two—Gulfstream jets that cost the taxpayers $172 million. She also lives rent-free in a home usually reserved for the head of the Coast Guard. She said she received enough threats that living in her apartment became untenable, which I can believe. Fine; so move to more secure location. But—rent free?
She will forever be remembered for those CECOT photos. And for the raids on American cities (of Los Angeles, she said: “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and mayor have placed on this country”). And for the masked agents, breaking the car windows of completely innocent people. In a mere 10 months, the legal, constitutional, psychic, and emotional damage she’s done to this country is nearly immeasurable.
Now for the rumor mill: According to recent scuttlebutt, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin may be first in line to replace her. Well, you think; he can’t be worse. And it’s true that Youngkin, who seems kind of folksy and decent if you don’t look very hard, appears to be the sort of person who wouldn’t take quite the sadistic pleasure in people’s suffering that Noem has.
But the one thing he’s done as governor that aligns him squarely in the MAGA fold has been his immigration stance. Early this year, right after Trump assumed the presidency, he issued an executive order calling on the state’s various agencies to cooperate fully with the federal government on immigration enforcement. In July, a man appeared at a county courthouse to pay a couple traffic fines. ICE nabbed him. Youngkin doubled down on the policy. Democratic governor-elect Abigail Spanberger vows that she’ll reverse Youngkin’s order.
In other words, there’s a reason Youngkin is in the hunt for the job. If he gets the gig, he probably won’t be as flashily cruel as Noem has been. But there’s every reason to think that he’ll do just what Stephen Miller tells him to do—if only because he’s leaving Richmond with his political future in shambles and needs to revive his career. If the Trump cabinet is his meal ticket, he’ll follow orders.
As we begin to move into the traditional phase of Cabinet resignations and new people taking over, the mainstream media will be tempted to credit these second-rounders as less zealous and more reasonable every chance they get. How many times will we have to go through this before they figure out that if anything, the successors are always worse?