bitchy | Donald Trump fired DHS secretary, dog killer and ‘ICE Barbie’ Kristi Noem

The first time then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem got any kind of national exposure, it was when she wrote a memoir in 2024 and she included a horrific story about shooting her family’s dog Cricket because Cricket annoyed her. Before that story, Noem had been something of a rising political figure in the GOP, but that dog-murder story seemed to dampen her shot at ever holding national office. Months later, Donald Trump appointed Noem as his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, overseeing ICE, FEMA and a million other agencies. As head of DHS, Noem oversaw ICE agents murdering American citizens, a mass kidnapping of immigrants (regardless of their actual immigration status), the formation of secret prisons and Alligator Alcatraz and a complete breakdown of, well, everything. And now Noem is out at DHS.

President Trump fired his embattled homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on Thursday and announced plans to replace her with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, after she was grilled by Republican lawmakers this week at congressional hearings on a variety of topics, including her knowledge of a contract with a politically connected firm.

Mr. Trump announced the change on social media, along with a new, and previously nonexistent, role for Ms. Noem: special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative for the Western Hemisphere.

Mr. Trump is close with Mr. Mullin, a Republican, and speaks with him regularly. Mr. Mullin said that Ms. Noem had “done the best that she could do under the circumstances,” but that he hoped to learn from her tenure and “build off things that didn’t quite go as planned.”

Ms. Noem — the first cabinet member to be ousted in Mr. Trump’s second term — had been among the key figures in the administration fulfilling his mass deportation effort, which he campaigned on aggressively and which was heavily influenced by Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser.

[From The NY Times]

For months, we’ve actually been hearing that Trump was less than enthused with Noem’s performance. It actually seemed like Border Patrol agents murdering Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January was a point of no return – after Noem and JD Vance tried to double-down on why Pretti’s murder was A-OK, Trump didn’t back them up whatsoever. In fact, that marked the beginning of the end for the Trump administration’s larger fascist push within Minneapolis. I’m not trying to make Trump sound like he did a good thing for a good reason at all – I’m saying even a demented madman like Trump understands that Noem was nothing but bad optics 24-7. Trump doesn’t care about the rule of law or democracy or America, but he does care about optics. Having this plastic-faced broad banging her sidepieces on government planes, handing out government contracts to cronies and then fumbling every interrogation she sat through, it was all too much for Trump. Cricket’s Revenge. Also: the new DHS guy Markwayne Mullin is a MAGA idiot too, but he probably (??) won’t be such a scandal-magnet.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.