The Dictatorship
Kristi Noem was everything a Cabinet member is not supposed to be
Historically, most Cabinet members have been quiet managers hired to competently implement the president’s agenda while overseeing agencies with tens of thousands of employees. It’s not that they avoid scandal as much as they aren’t typically scandalous people. But that’s not what President Donald Trump has prioritized for the Cabinet in his second term, as shown by the saga of outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was unceremoniously fired this week.
Instead of hiring quiet, competent managers, Trump has hired people who love being on camera and don’t consider it beneath their dignity to cartoonishly lavish the president with praise. Noem, who, as the governor of South Dakota, gave Trump a bust of Mount Rushmore with his face on it, fit the bill.
As governor, Noem had already achieved some level of notoriety before joining the Cabinet for starring in a $9 million series of goofy ads touting South Dakota jobs, allegedly intervening to help her daughter obtain a real estate appraiser license and, most infamously, admitting in her memoir that she took Cricket, an “untrainable” family dogto a gravel pit and shot her dead.
None of those controversies stopped Trump from picking Noem to head the third-largest Cabinet department and making her responsible for everything from ensuring the safety of the nation’s airports to overseeing the president’s sweeping mass deportation program.
If anything, those past scandals may have been a positive. The president seems to appreciate people who survive their own political storms. Noem’s rocky past also didn’t stop the Senate from confirming her nomination, 59-34in a vote that included every Republican and seven Democrats.
She joined a team that is less like a typical presidential Cabinet and more like the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: There’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an ax-throwing Fox News host with tattoos straight out of “The Da Vinci Code”; there’s Human and Health Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the scion of a legendary Democratic family turned notorious anti-vaxxer who once left a bear carcass in Central Park and said he had a brain worm; and there’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former reality TV cast member-turned-congressman who is obsessed with boosting the country’s birthrateto name a few. Still, once in that Cabinet, Noem held her weight when it came to generating more controversy.
Among other things, she was unable to define habeas corpus, a basic constitutional principle, at a Senate hearing; flew to El Salvador to pose for a bizarre photo at the notorious CECOT prison; made herself the star of a $220 million ad campaign that followed a no-bid contract; claimed not to recognize a U.S. senator at a news conference who was forcibly removed and handcuffed; baselessly called two Americans killed by immigration agents domestic terrorists; took time out to criticize a country music singer over his lyrics critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and reportedly spent $172 million of taxpayer money on two Gulfstream private jets.
And then there’s the actions of the department she oversaw.
Under her leadership, ICE eliminated age requirements for applicantsmany of whom reportedly failed an open-book test on immigration and constitutional law; allowed agents to wear masks and balaclavas to hide their identities as they conducted raids; expanded the controversial use of administrative warrants not signed by a judge to forcibly enter people’s homes; earned rebukes from multiple federal judges for refusing to follow court rulings; violently detained at least 170 American citizens; and had its deadliest year in two decadesas 32 people died in its custody. And then there’s the two American citizens who were shot and killed while observing ICE agents at work.
Just a few days before the end of her first year in office, Noem became the first member of Trump’s Cabinet to have articles of impeachment filed against her. Democrats forced a shutdown of her department until Republicans agree to a handful of modest reforms. So far, they haven’t.
It’s hard to say which of these controversies — or others I’m not including here — was the final straw that prompted Trump to unceremoniously fire her.
We shouldn’t think of Cabinet officials this much.
We shouldn’t think of Cabinet officials this much. They should not only be quietly competent, but almost as anonymous as corporate CEOs whose names we don’t know unless they are getting caught cheating at a Coldplay concert or going viral after awkwardly calling their chain’s new cheeseburger “a product.”
In the end, everything that Noem did was shocking, but not surprising. The only surprise was that she was allowed to join a presidential Cabinet in the first place.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline.