Noem No More: Democracy Still Works, Even in Donald Trump’s America

We could all breathe a sigh of relief if Donald Trump had fired Kristi Noem for the right reasons. If, for example, Trump had determined that a Cabinet member who accused two American citizens of engaging in “domestic terrorism”—after they’d been shot at point-blank range by masked agents under her charge—had crossed a bright moral line, rendering said Cabinet member an unsalvageable liability, then we could all sleep a little easier.

But that’s what would happen on Earth 1. On the Earth 2 of Trump 2.0, Noem was fired—of course—for upstaging the boss and shifting blame for one of her errors onto him. The error was the $220 million ad campaign that featured images of Noem on horseback, sporting requisite high-end hat and jodhpurs, out where the buffalo once roamed, banging on about “freedom.” Under questioning from GOP Senator John Kennedy, she made the fateful mistake of saying that Trump had approved the ads. And that was all she wrote.

Well, as Johnny Rotten said when Elvis kicked it (quite unfairly, in that case), “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Outside of Stephen Miller, Noem is probably the purest fascist among Trump’s second-term frontline appointees. I say this because she understands spectacle, which is such a key element of the fascist worldview. The visual humiliation of those deemed to be human vermin by the regime in power sits at the heart of the historical fascist project. Those photos of her standing in front of the nearly naked prisoners of CECOT with her Rolex prominently displayed might constitute the single most indelibly fascist image of this presidency.

So that’s the first piece of bad news about Noem’s departure: It happened for the wrong reasons. The second piece of bad news is that it’s unlikely to produce much substantive change. Markwayne Mullin, whom Trump has nominated for the job, and whom we must assume will be confirmed by his fellow senators, doesn’t seem like someone whose ideas about the world are terribly different from Noem’s.

He will probably be smart enough to be less ostentatiously reactionary in front of the cameras. Although—maybe not. Have a look at this clip of his appearance on CNN after the execution of Renee Good. “Police officers are doing their job, and she was interfering in their job,” he said. “If you don’t wanna be in harm’s way, don’t get in the way of police officers who are doing their job.” Aside from the fact that ICE agents are not “police officers”—and that Good was getting herself out of the way at the time of this fatal confrontation—there’s Mullins’s clear and sick implication that Good deserved to be shot. Not arrested. Shot.

Combine that outlook with the fact that Stephen Miller will still be the one really calling the shots, and reasons for hope hang by a very slender thread. Indeed, there’s a lot of speculation out there that this was all orchestrated by Miller, and that Mullin is his man. Certainly, someone with less hunger for media attention can get away with more.

However, there is one piece of good news in Noem’s exit. Assaulting Trump’s fragile ego may have been the back-breaking straw here. But before that, she started to become a bigger problem than she was worth. And that happened not because of Trump or Miller or her ads or her Rolex. That happened because of you.

There’s no question that a year ago, Trump, Miller, and Noem assumed they had carte blanche to do as they wished with respect to undocumented immigrants. Why shouldn’t they have? Trump won on immigration, in significant part. He made no secret on the campaign trail of wanting to round up millions and either detain them or ship them off. And the people elected him.

But then a funny thing happened. The collective conscience of many millions of Americans was pricked. And the people rose up and said no, most notably in Chicago and Minneapolis. But really, people all over the country stood up. In late January, a nationwide anti-ICE walkout protest boasted more than 300 locations around the country, with at least one in nearly every state. Many of these protests have been organized by churches, which makes it a little harder for Trump to dismiss the “troublemakers” as Marxist lunatics.

There’s no question that all this highly visible agitation made the ice, so to speak, on which Noem was skating considerably thinner than it might have been. And immigration as an issue has been transformed from a notable Trump strength into one of his most glaring weaknesses. We’ve learned that most Americans value what immigrants—even those who arrived illegally, provided they’ve lived productive lives since—bring to this country. It’s been heartening to see.

That’s democracy in action. Trump and his people hate it. But the key point is this: They are not above it. Even they have to respond, to some extent, to the will of the people. They are supported at this point by a zealous minority that thinks it’s a majority. It is not. The percentage that strongly approves of Trump is generally somewhere in the low to mid-twenties. In this late February CNN poll, it’s 19 percent.

Strongly disapprove, by contrast? That was 48 percent. Practically a majority. That’s you (I presume), and that’s me, and that’s millions of good Americans who understand what democracy and freedom actually mean. And we need to keep in mind the real lesson of Noem’s demise: No matter what the Democrats in Washington do or don’t do, we still have power in our hands. Let’s keep using it.