At times, you could be forgiven for having thought that Kristi Noem wanted to be a uniformed DHS officer rather than the secretary of the department. Now, the Cabinet member most inclined to glamour shots 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 Donald Trump has been loathe to oust top officials this time around. 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 story, but even if a fraction of it was true, it was damning. The two were turfy, sharp-elbowed bureaucratic players, not an unusual offense in Washington. But their enemies tended to be people who knew what they were doing, with 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 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 Kristi Noem. She was on horseback and in chaps.
Noem could not 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 already had 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 deficiencies, including no notable experience in immigration enforcement. She was camera-ready and loyal, so why not? Her designated replacement, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, also doesn’t have a background in immigration. One hopes, though, that he won’t interfere with the professionals.
The French 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.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
