By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Kristi Noem rides off into the sunset
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 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.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2026 by King Features Synd., Inc.