After Kristi Noem’s Senate hearing this week, President Donald Trump called up Republican Sen. John Kennedy in a rage.
“He was mad as a murder hornet,” the Louisiana senator told The Independent and other reporters Thursday. “I remember thinking that the secretary’s pretty much as dead as fried chicken,” he told another gaggle of reporters.
The outgoing Homeland Security Secretary was already hanging by a thread, but the final nail in the coffin came this week during combative congressional testimony, where the Louisiana senator played a leading role.
During two days of blistering criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, Noem said Trump had signed off on a multimillion-dollar ad campaign (a claim that reportedly “incensed” the president and prompted him to deny it publicly), rebuffed attempts to directly address allegations of an improper relationship with her top adviser, and refused to apologize for falsely labeling two American citizens slain by federal agents operating under the DHS umbrella as domestic terrorists.
Noem made history Thursday as the first Cabinet secretary ousted in Trump’s second term, but many were left unsurprised; the writing had been on the wall for months.
“Replacing Kristi was based on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” a Trump administration official told The Atlantic.
Noem will become “special envoy” for a little-known security initiative called “The Shield of the Americas,” while Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin has been tapped to replace her.
It has been quite the fall from grace for Noem, who at one point was being considered by Trump as his running mate in the 2024 presidential election, according to The Atlantic. Her name was crossed off the list of contenders over her admission in a memoir that she shot her own puppy.
Trump actually viewed the outrageous act as “an asset” and it was one of the reasons he tapped Noem to head up Homeland Security instead, according to an excerpt of an upcoming book about the meltdown at the department under her tenure.
She was chastised over the dog killing in the congressional hearings this week, which ultimately proved to be “water boiling over the edge of the pot” for Trump, as one Republican senator put it to NBC News.
Here The Independent looks back at Noem’s chaotic 13-month tenure as the Department of Homeland Security chief.
Minneapolis became the focal point of Trump’s immigration crackdown late last year after Homeland Security deployed thousands of federal agents to the Minnesota city. In January, those operations turned deadly when agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens: mother of three Renee Good on Jan. 7 and Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, on Jan. 24.
Trump-aligned Kennedy joined Democrats Tuesday in trying to get Noem to answer why she would baselessly accuse Good and Pretti of domestic terrorism after her officers shot them at point-blank range.
Noem refused to back down and apologize for falsely labeling the American citizens as domestic terrorists, a move which saw her sidelined at the time by Trump. He sent his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to “clean up the mess,” The Atlantic reported.
