By Rich Lowry
Friday, March 06, 2026
At times, you could be forgiven for having thought that Kristi
Noem wanted to be a uniformed Department of Homeland Security officer
rather than the secretary of the department.
Now, the cabinet member most inclined to glamour shots
out in the field is going to have to go back to wearing civilian clothes.
For all his trademark firings during The Apprentice
and the rapid turnover of his first term, President Trump has been loath to
oust top officials this time around. Kristi Noem is the exception, and she’s
earned the dubious distinction.
Incompetent and preposterously self-promoting, Noem took
a serious role and made it like something out of the HBO political spoof Veep.
The Wall Street Journal recently published a
devastating report on her time at the department, which she ran in close
partnership with the man she’s been rumored to be having an affair with, former
Trump consultant Corey Lewandowski (she dismisses such reports as tabloid
trash).
It was a little like Antony and Cleopatra on the Potomac,
except the empire was a sprawling bureaucracy and as farce rather than tragedy.
According to the Journal, Lewandowski fired a
Coast Guard pilot who left Noem’s blanket behind on another plane and then,
when they reached their destination, reinstated him because there wasn’t anyone
else to fly them home.
Reportedly, Noem tracked how often Tom Homan, the border
czar who supplanted her in Minneapolis, was on TV and sought to outpace him.
The Journal related that Lewandowski was desperate
to get a federally issued gun and badge and exacted retribution against those
who didn’t cooperate (he failed to get the gun but apparently got the badge).
DHS officials denied much of the Journal story,
but even if a fraction of it was true, it was still damning.
The two were turfy, sharp-elbowed bureaucratic players,
not a new or unusual offense in Washington. But their enemies tended to be
people who knew what they were doing, with Tom Homan high on the list.
Noem and Lewandowski raised eyebrows by taking an unusual
amount of control over the department’s spending.
Self-dealing played a direct role in Noem’s
defenestration. The department approved a $220 million contract — funneled in
part through firms run by Noem and Lewandowski allies — for an ad campaign
encouraging illegal immigrants to go home.
The ad starred — who else? — Kristi Noem. She was on
horseback and in chaps. The implicit message was that if illegal immigrants
didn’t leave on their own, she’d immediately form a posse and run them over the
border.
It was a production worthy of a spaghetti western, or —
more to the point, given her political ambitions — a commercial for a 2028
presidential campaign.
Noem couldn’t defend the sketchy spending decisions, or
the blatantly self-glorifying ad, or much of anything else, in brutal
back-to-back House and Senate congressional hearings that precipitated her
doom.
She’d already been taken down a notch after the
Minneapolis ICE operation went sideways. Not working with copious supplies of
credibility to begin with, she tossed away whatever she had by instantly
labeling both agitators shot by DHS agents “domestic terrorists.”
All of this said, it was Trump who hired Noem despite her
manifest deficiencies, including no notable experience in immigration
enforcement. She was camera-ready and loyal, so why not?
Her designated replacement, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne
Mullin, also doesn’t have a background in immigration policy. One hopes,
though, that he won’t interfere with the professionals and will continue the
Homan-backed approach of focusing on apprehending illegal immigrants who have
committed other criminal offenses and received final orders of removal, and
ramping up worksite enforcement.
The French World War I–era statesman Georges Clemenceau
once said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” By the same
token, immigration enforcement is too important to be left to self-serving
glory hounds who are focused more on the main chance than the underlying
mission.
Trump’s first firing was the right one.
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