Kristi Noem would’ve been fired over Minnesota in the first Trump White House. Here’s who may have saved her

If embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is penning any thank-you notes to express her gratitude for not having been summarily sacked this week after plunging the Trump administration into crisis over Minneapolis, she might want to start with Michael Flynn.

Flynn is the disgraced former U.S. Army general who served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for a whopping 22 days at the outset of Trump’s first term eight years ago.

A conspiracy theorist and uber-Trump loyalist, Flynn lost his job three weeks into Trump’s presidency after it became known that he’d lied to both the FBI and then-vice president Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

Amid a torrent of negative press and questions about his campaign’s alleged ties to the Russian government’s efforts to help him win the 2016 presidential race, Trump fired the retired military officer in a futile effort to put the story to bed. It became one of his biggest regrets from his first stint in the White House.

That’s why Trump’s return to power nearly a decade on has included what Vanity Fair first called a “no scalps” policy under which the now-47th president is uncharacteristically loath to use his famous “you’re fired” catchphrase on anyone now serving under him.

It’s the same reason U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz is living in a ritzy New York condominium at government expense instead of having to find work in the private sector despite having casually dropped highly classified attack plans into a Signal chat — to which he’d added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

According to multiple sources, Trump returned to power determined above nearly all else to avoid the trait which led his first term to feature the highest turnover in any presidential cabinet in modern history.

Responding to negative reporting and revelation of wrongdoing by firing the offenders was why by this time in 2018 he’d already sacked his Health and Human Services secretary (for misusing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to pay for private jet travel), removed his Homeland Security secretary so he could serve as White House chief of staff, and within months would fire his Secretary of State and Veterans Affairs secretary over policy differences and negative reporting about his misuse of government funds, respectively.

A person close to Trump told The Independent that as he reflected on his first term during his time out of power, he decided that he’d been “weak” to so easily fire advisers in response to pressure from media reporting.

That’s why, so far, Noem can remain in her role atop DHS even though the president has layered her by sending Border Czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to take charge and de-escalate tensions in Minneapolis, where the roving patrols and mass arrests that were being conducted by Border Patrol agents under now-relieved “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino had been met with massive and ongoing protests from the city’s population.

Bovino, who’d been a middle management Border Patrol executive in charge of the El Centro, California sector before his rough treatment of protesters in Los Angeles brought him to Noem’s attention, has been similarly buried, sent back to his original post where he is reportedly preparing his retirement papers.

Trump has thus far offered the usual tepid soundbites expressing “confidence” in Noem when asked to do so by reporters, even going so far as saying she was doing “a very good job” before a day-trip to Iowa on Tuesday.

But two days later, he delivered what Italians might call Il bacio della morte — the “kiss of death” — to the ex-South Dakota governor when he pointedly declined to let he speak during the first cabinet meeting of the new year.

That’s a fate possibly worse than firing in Trumpworld, where one’s ability to publicly praise the president and attack the press (and Democrats) in various public forums is often the coin of the realm.

And while she’s still firmly ensconced in her office at the former insane asylum (once home to would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley) that has been converted into a sprawling headquarters campus for DHS, Noem may well be the first Trump cabinet secretary to get the hook this year.

Members of Congress from both parties have been unimpressed by her performance since taking office, with many taking umbrage at her refusal to appear before Congress for regular oversight and budgeting hearings in the same way her predecessors have done since the department was created under the George W. Bush administration.

And her blunders in the wake of the Pretti shooting have gotten her awful reviews from key Republican senators who Trump needs to keep the government running, confirm his nominees and pass any legislation he might want to put his Sharpie-branded pen to in the mine months remaining until voters decide whether to keep the GOP in charge of the House and Senate.

In tried-and-true Trumpian fashion, Trump and people close to him have indeed had conversations about potential replacements for Noem. The Independent understands two potential candidates include newly-unemployed ex-Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and former Utah congressman turned Fox News talking head Jason Chaffetz.

And according to RealClearPolitics, Trump or his confidants have also bandied about trying to elevate Homan or moving EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin into the DHS secretary’s role, though doing so on a permanent basis would require a bruising Senate confirmation battle.

But with the midterms looming and polling growing more dismal for the GOP by the week, Trump’s desire for a scapegoat and Noem’s ineptitude may give him more than enough reason to grasp her expensively-styled hair and take out his knife.