Remembering the half life of a puppy killer
By Marc C. Johnson
(Photo) – The former Cabinet secretary known as ICE Barbie preens in front of inmates in the notorious Salvadoran prison back when she was merely loathsome and not yet criminal.
When someone as odious, but also as infamous as Kristi Noem, the defenestrated former Secretary of Homeland Security, gets the can tied to them I often wonder how their eventual obit will read in The New York Times.
What about Kristi Noem’s (ICE Barbie) ramshackle and corrupt tenure will make the first graph in that obit?
Will it be that she was “the first Cabinet member fired in Trump’s second term” because of …
- Her horrid, incompetent, evil, illegal, deadly mismanagement of an agency that violated the Constitutional rights of thousands of people, including many American citizens, and killed several?
- Her vast web of grifting contracts to politically connected operatives that squandered hundred of millions of dollars of our money, much of it for silly ads featuring Kristi Noem?
- Her lying before Congress (that should get her prosecuted)?
- Her performative prancing in a Border Patrol uniform wearing a Rolex watch and tipping her cowboy hat (among other things) to her, ugh, chief advisor Corey Lewandowski?
Or maybe her murdered puppy, Cricket, will end up in the first graph. So much to choose from.
But before we refocus and move on to the next depredation from Trump World let’s remember why Kristi Noem got the job she’s now lost and why she won’t be the last out our national exit of sleaze.
The hall of shame
Perhaps Noem will end up like other other disgraced Cabinet secretaries, including the bribe taking Albert Fall in 1929.
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Or maybe the lying to Congress moments put Noem in John Mitchell territory. Mitchell went to jail in 1977.
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Who am I kidding?
If Noem is ultimately convicted of anything in a federal court Trump will pardon her. That’s her ultimate “get out of jail free card.”
It shouldn’t be so, but there you have it.
Why, oh, why
Noem, the former scandal plagued governor of South Dakota, should never have been nominated or confirmed for the job she so royally screwed up. In a normal democracy she would never have had the opportunity to be shown the door.
But we’re not in a normal democracy.
Noem left South Dakota under a cloud of chaotic corruption – misuse of the state airplane, special treatment before a state agency for her daughter, failing to disclose money that supplemented her salary as governor and more and more.
And all that was before she admitted to shooting and killing the family dog in a gravel pit and then dispatching a goat she didn’t much like.
She thought telling that story was some show of her character. And, even though it took a while she was right. It was a glaring look at her character.
I don’t know about you but the pattern before she was nominated might have raised a few disqualifying questions about her suitability to run one of the largest agencies of the federal government.
Yet, every Senate Republican and seven Democrats – seven Democrats! – voted to confirm this human car wreck from Watertown, South Dakota.
Noem only got the job she botched because she played Donald Trump like a fiddle.
She had no real qualifications.
No law enforcement experience.
No management experience beyond often mismanaging the South Dakota state government workforce.
South Dakota state employees number less than 15,000. Homeland Security’s workforce is more than 250,000. To say that she was out of her depth is perhaps a bit of understatement.
But Noem knew the way to Mar-a-Lago. She stroked Trump’s ego with a big and dangerous fireworks display at Mt. Rushmore in 2020.
She played along with Trump’s fantasy of joining Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln on that mountain.
She joined in the Cabinet room daisy chain of Trump praise, once saying:
“Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, as Trump quietly said, “Yeah.”
“Even you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that,” she continued.
Noem was loved by Trump until she wasn’t. And even then it wasn’t her incompetence, or the ICE officer murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis or even the grifting and corruption in plain view.
What got Noem was her showing up the Mafia boss who occupies the Oval Office.
It was those ads starring … Kristi Noem. As always with Trump it’s all about the optics. And the optics are always about him.
Here’s Nick Miroff, Michael Scherer, and Russell Berman in The Atlantic:
Noem had been saying for more than a year that the idea for the ads came from Trump himself. But with public opinion souring on Trump’s mass deportations, the messaging campaign that Noem touted as a success—and the no-bid contracts behind it—had come under suspicion from lawmakers. A person familiar with the decision to fire Noem told us that the president was upset about her attempt to pass the blame for the ad campaign onto him, and for her equivocation on the questions about her alleged romantic relationship with Corey Lewandowski, who has been working at DHS as her de facto chief of staff.
Senate failure
But before we leave the puppy killer to her ultimate fate let’s remember the United States senators who rubber stamped her appointment, including the two from South Dakota – John Thune and Mike Rounds – who know Noem’s record of bumbling sleaze better than anyone else.
And no free pass for the Senate Democrats – what were they thinking – who voted to confirm her.
If we had a real Senate, Kristi Noem would never have even been considered for the job she so royally screwed up let alone been confirmed.
Noem won’t be the last to be shown the door in this administration, but she was the first, and that is something, and something good. Let’s call it a start.
At the end of this day and the end of this horrible period of violence and death and abysmal corruption, the farce of a Kristi Noem in any important job is surely on Donald Trump and the people who confirmed her to a position of influence and power, a position most of them knew was way beyond her capabilities and her character.
The tragedy, however, will linger long after Noem is long forgotten, even as speculation persists that ICE Barbie is plotting her next political step.
There is no Valhalla in MAGA World, but there can be a new podcast.
Now, brace yourself and get ready for Markwayne Mullin.
More on that soon because, well, this Senate never learns. And the president is, after all, as skilled at personnel management is he once was at bankrupting a casino.
About Marc C. Johnson: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.
I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.
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