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Good riddance to Kristi Noem. Her replacement won’t be an improvement | Moira Donegan

Was it the blanket that did it? On Thursday, Donald Trump announced he fired Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, in a post on Truth Social. Noem, at the time, was giving a press briefing in Nashville, and did not seem aware that she had been fired; she later posted on social media to thank the president for the new role that he had created for her as a golden parachute: “Envoy to the Shield of the Americas”, which sounds like something from a children’s superhero cartoon. Noem’s dismissal comes after a chaotic time at the department, in which she had endured successive national outcries over ICE kidnapping operations and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti; corruption and mismanagement scandals within the department; rumors about an alleged extramarital relationship with her top aide and former Trump campaign chief, Corey Lewandowski; and scrutiny over her award of a lucrative advertising contract to a personal ally. Noem’s tenure at DHS seems to have been marked by state violence, managerial incompetence, and shockingly unprofessional conduct. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Lewandowski summarily fired the pilot of a plane Noem was traveling on when a blanket (or possibly a bag) she had used on her flight was not retrieved for her when she switched planes. The pilot had to be quickly rehired because there was no one else to fly the secretary home.

Noem’s ousting comes just days after her contentious testimony at a pair of Senate committee hearings, at which even Republican House members made a point of being seen to criticize her on camera. Just hours before Trump’s announcement, the Senate had failed yet again to pass a measure which would resume funding for DHS; the department has been the subject of a congressional funding battle in which a partial government shutdown has flowed from Democrats’ demands that new limits be placed on the department’s immigration enforcement activities.

During her tenure at DHS, Noem became a figurehead of cruelty for those immigration policies. A fan of photo ops and publicity stunts, she traveled to El Salvador last year to pose in front of a cage full of shirtless, tattooed prisoners at Cecot, the massive prison camp to which many immigrants from the US were summarily shipped without due process in the early months of the Trump administration. She similarly traveled to the Florida Everglades to pose at the camp called “Alligator Alcatraz”, a tent city in the southern swamp in which immigrants were detained in bunk beds behind chain link cages. At each of these stops, Noem made sure to contrast the brutality of the concentration camps where she was being photographed with her own coiffed, powdered, and surgically enhanced appearance; she was always made up in exaggerated Maga style, a Trump hat over her beachy waves.

Noem was incompetent, corrupt, and seemingly indifferent to both the law and to human suffering. But in this, she was not so much a liability for the Trump administration as a perfect embodiment of Mag governance. Her rule over DHS was marked by an aggressive pursuit of the mass deportation and ethnic cleansing campaign that Trump campaigned on heavily in 2024; she seems to have been heavily influenced in her decision-making by the advice of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who is known for his hardline views on immigration and racial supremacy. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,” she is said to have told one interlocutor.

Noem’s departure, then, seems unlikely to ring in a new era of responsibility, legality or professionalism at the department. In his post firing her, Trump said that Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma and a former MMA fighter, would be the next DHS secretary; technically, such an appointment requires Senate approval, but Mullin’s nomination seems unlikely to face much meaningful resistance in the Republican-controlled upper chamber. Mullin, a close Trump ally and immigration maximalist, is unlikely to mark much of a departure from Noem, either in policy substance or managerial savvy. The mass deportations, self-dealing and aggressive, even seemingly contemptuous approach to citizens and their rights seems likely to continue for as long as Trump, Miller and their allies control the vast apparatus of the DHS.

But Noem’s departure, the first firing of a cabinet secretary in Trump’s second term, does reflect the president’s profound political weakness as the nation heads toward the November midterms. Shock and outrage persists at the killings of Good and Pretti, as does a growing awareness of the scope and brutality of ICE detention. The mass protests during an ICE surge in Minneapolis have provided opponents of Trump’s immigration crackdown with both a sense of the injustice of ICE’s kidnappings and a playbook for how to publicize and obstruct them.

The president’s approval ratings are plummeting, and the operations of his DHS agencies are a big part of the reason why; the Republicans who made a point of criticizing Noem when she appeared before them at those Senate hearings likely did so because they can see the same poll numbers as everyone else. The president is bogged down by scandal, pursing a policy agenda being stymied by funding strikes in Congress and protests in the streets, has mysterious but seemingly persistent physical health problems, and has not been able to get the public to stop paying attention to his onetime friendship with a pedophile sex trafficker – not even by starting a war. He’s lost some crucial redistricting fights in the courts, and just days ago, the supreme court threw out his tariffs – his signature economic policy. He must be enraged; of course, someone had to go. Noem was dead weight. But throwing her overboard won’t get Trump back afloat.