President Trump had good cause yesterday to fire Kristi Noem from being homeland security secretary, giving her the ax via social media post, with Trump announcing that she was being replaced by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, apparently without bothering to inform her first.
That followed her disastrous congressional testimony just the prior day, in which Noem had gotten rare bipartisan flak for her mismanagement, including misspending hundreds of millions of dollars, allowing her agents to repeatedly violate laws and the constitution and allegedly having an affair with top DHS official Corey Lewandowski. She is apparently now special envoy for some Monroe Doctrine fakery that Trump is cooking up.
It is surely a terrible loss for her to no longer have access to the video crews she loved having follow her around and the private jets she had grown accustomed to using. Perhaps in her downtime, Noem can spend quality time reflecting on her tenure, perhaps around why she let herself be a tool for dismantling the core functions of the department that she ran, which made all of us less safe, only for Trump to unceremoniously toss her out, as he always does.
Here is a helpful list of things she might think about: how her department put a 22-year-old with no relevant experience in charge of counterterrorism grants and gutted CISA, the agency responsible for protecting us against cyberattack, just in time for such threats to multiply in the wake of Trump’s Iran strike.
Or how she constrained the operations of FEMA, slowing down relief for Texas flood survivors and setting us up for dire consequences once hurricane and wildfire seasons really get going. Or perhaps how DHS greatly expanded domestic surveillance, not of terrorists and criminals, but people suspected of civil immigration offenses and those exercising political speech in ways that Trump didn’t like, going as far as illegally obtaining secret tax records.
And, of course, how she presided over mass, aggressive deployments of masked and heavily armed federal agents — many taken away from more important duties, like investigating child trafficking — to politically oppositional cities around the country to harass residents, arrest protesters and damage their economies.
Did any of this enhance our national security? It did not, and we think that Noem on some level knows that. She chose the path of fealty to Trump — a path that is always unreciprocated — and in doing so violated her own oath of office and the serious responsibilities with which she was entrusted.
She may now be off doing some phony special envoy job that Trump has apparently invented, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have questions left to answer. Congress should keep hauling her in to answer questions about the totality of the Trump administration’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law.
As for Mullin, he might be Trump’s pick now to carry on this agenda, but our pesky Constitution requires confirmation by the Senate. As that process unfolds, his colleagues should ask the senator what if anything he intends to do to remedy the damage Noem has done; if he doesn’t have good answers, he should not follow her into this crucial role.
