Trump Kicks Kristi Noem To The Curb For Being Exactly The Sort Of Person Trump Wanted Her To Be

I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I’m not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn’t worth celebrating.

Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in the foot by shooting a dog in her gravel pit and then telling the world about it in her incredibly premature memoirs. What was meant to be a self-congratulatory anecdote about doing what needs to be done was correctly read by pretty much everyone as little more than a person gloating about inflicting misery on animals and her own children.

Kristi Noem spent most of her time as the DHS Secretary making sure she showed up front and center in social media posts. She also was always the first to portray anyone killed or wounded by federal officers as “terrorists,” and refused to walk back those comments after the facts proved otherwise.

She gifted herself with an expensive private jet so she could arrive at the next photo op in style. She moved into an expensive taxpayer-funded residence despite already living in another expensive taxpayer-funded residence. She blew $220 million on an ad campaign featuring her blown-dry looks and vapid statements that apparently also funneled some of that windfall back into her own pockets.

She continued to stay the course even as the national winds shifted in response to oppressive, blue state-targeting “immigration enforcement” efforts. She stood idly by while her officers violated rights, physically assaulted peaceful protesters, and literally murdered two people in one US city alone.

Realizing this putsch was hurting him more than helping him, Trump first sent Nazi-cosplayer Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino back to the actual border, forcing him out of the spotlight and back into the necessary but not-at-all-glamorous job of actually securing the border.

Noem was next. In a somewhat surprising move, Trump booted a true MAGA believer into irrelevance, taking Noem from an “is” to a “was” while she was engaged in a press briefing. She’s now the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, which is exactly the sort of made-up position you’d shunt someone into if you didn’t want to be blamed for their hiring, but also didn’t want them to do any more damage to your administration.

Now that Noem’s been turfed, the knives are out. It’s not just leading GOP members now pretending she’s this administration’s Nikolai Yezhov. It’s also pro-Trump outlets like Fox News smelling the blood in the water but, of course, only speaking out now that the water’s more red than blue:

We can now openly admit what has been unfolding before our eyes for a year: that Kristi Noem was an utter, complete, total catastrophe, her tenure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) little more than a self-promoting crusade.

She was unqualified for the job from day one, and largely responsible for the awful excesses of ICE and the frustrating failures of FEMA. 

President Donald Trump’s decision to fire her, which took way too long, liberates many Republicans to acknowledge what many in the media, including me, along with Democrats and outside critics, have been saying all along: Noem was a slow-motion train wreck. 

Walk into the ocean, Howard Kurtz. You pretend like you’re a journalist and analyst and yet you state — openly! — that you weren’t willing to speak out against Kristi Noem (an apparent “utter, complete, total catastrophe”) until after Trump fired her. If you had any spine or ethics, you would have made your opinions known months ago and been hailed as a savvy insider. Now you just look like a practice squad Monday morning quarterback.

But enough about Kurtz. Here’s more about Noem, who was a spectacular failure on every level. Here’s another lowlight of Noem’s short federal career, as reported by The New Republic:

ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 vehicles custom-wrapped to say “ICE” on the side, three sources told the Washington Examiner. The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window.

The vehicles first appeared in a DHS video intended to make ICE look cool. But a fleet of ostentatious cars are useless to Trump’s masked militia, which typically disappears people using unmarked vehicles.

Noem stans might want to pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with her since it was a former deputy director handling this purchase. No dice, weirdos. Noem has made it clear since day one that she’s the only one who can approve spending like this, which is something she used to defend refusing to send FEMA aid to places that weren’t sufficiently Trumpish.

That’s on top of other things that may have forced Trump to dump a die-hard ally. The first was the $220 million-worth of masturbation Noem performed, which came in the form of Noem-focused DHS ads featuring her sitting on a horse in front of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Noem claimed the ad campaign was approved by Trump while testifying to Congress. Trump immediately said otherwise when questioned by reporters.

Then there were the three jets (two Gulfstreams and a remodeled 737) Noem wanted for her own personal use as DHS Secretary. On top of that, there were the rumors that Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski (another ridiculous MAGA asshat) were having an extramarital affair.

All of this was piled on top of a rapidly disintegrating “surge” in Minneapolis, which single-handedly managed to turn public opinion against Trump, at least in terms of immigration enforcement. Noem insisted on being the public face of this, competing with fellow sadists like the previously-mentioned (and similarly demoted) Gregory Bovino.

We should all dance on the professional grave of Kristi Noem, who sold out entirely to MAGA just to be stuck in a Special Envoy cubicle until she either gets demoted again or decides she’s better off back in South Dakota. Noem made her own bed. Now she gets to lay in it, along with her killed dog, which means she’s not only having to deal with her own shittily-made bed, but the fleas that come with it.

She couldn’t even make it 18 months. That’s heartening. That means a bunch more people who sold their souls for MAGA rock and roll are likely to find their loyalty repaid with GTFO orders from the boss man who won’t tolerate anything that doesn’t immediately look like a win. They deserve everything that’s coming to them, including the possibility of criminal or contempt charges for playing fast and loose with the laws and the US Constitution while holding, however briefly, their positions of power.

We won’t miss you, Kristi. You were the epitome of everything people hate about political appointees. The most you can hope for is that your swift defenestration will be somehow instructive for those following in your shady, subordinate footsteps. If not, you’ll be nothing more than a foul breeze, remembered only for the odor you created while passing through the political system. But you were exactly what Trump wanted, right up until he decided he didn’t.