'As dead as fried chicken': Why Trump fired Kristi Noem after ad row

US President Donald Trump grew angry after Noem told lawmakers that he had personally approved the campaign; Trump hadn't

By Myles Miller and Jeff Mason

 

Kristi Noem’s 13-month tenure leading the Department of Homeland Security was marked by controversy. But it wasn’t the two American citizens’ deaths at the hands of federal immigration agents that ultimately cost her the job, nor the allegations of an affair with an adviser, or the criticism that she was slow to provide federal reimbursements to states after natural disasters.  

Instead, she was taken down by an almost quarter-billion-dollar advertising campaign starring herself.

 

On Tuesday, she told a Senate committee the contract for the campaign had gone to competitive bid. On Wednesday, before the House, she acknowledged it hadn’t.

 

That testimony ended her tenure.

 

According to a person familiar with the episode, President Donald Trump grew angry after Noem told lawmakers that he had personally approved the campaign. Trump hadn’t, the person said. Trump told Reuters on Thursday he was unaware of the ad campaign.

 

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who sharply questioned Noem during Tuesday’s hearing, said Trump called him after expressing displeasure. The president was “not a happy cowboy,” Kennedy said. “I remember thinking that the secretary’s pretty much as dead as fried chicken.”

 

Trump posted on social media Thursday that Noem would depart DHS effective March 31. He said that she would take a role as a special envoy for the Western Hemisphere. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin will be nominated to lead DHS. The change marked the first time Trump has replaced a cabinet member during his second term.  

The move came so suddenly that Trump announced his decision on Truth Social just minutes before Noem walked on stage for a scheduled speech at a policing conference in Nashville, where she talked about the Trump administration’s work targeting cartels. Shortly before, she had arrived to the event in an armoured SUV and was on the phone with Trump, according to two people familiar with the call who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

 

That profligate spending — and her assertion that Trump approved it — brought about Noem’s downfall may be surprising given that she presented herself as one of Washington’s most disciplined fiscal stewards, a cabinet secretary who personally reviewed contracts and wrung billions of dollars in savings from her department.

 

She found a massive $150 billion border wall proposal that ran just two pages, with no named contractors and no breakdown of costs, according to a person briefed on the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. She identified a drone contract priced at more than twice what the aircraft cost. She saved hundreds of millions of dollars on a single contract simply by asking whether it could be done cheaper, the person said.

 

Then came the ads. The $220 million campaign promoting the administration’s immigration crackdown featured Noem throughout. In one, she appeared on horseback before Mount Rushmore. In others, she looked into the camera and told migrants to leave.

 

A person familiar with the conversations on Capitol Hill during this week’s hearings, who asked not to be identified to discuss private conversations, said some congressional Republicans had grown weary of the controversies surrounding Noem, particularly as immigration was expected to be a political advantage for the party but polling has shown the GOP losing support on the issue.

 

In the weeks before her dismissal, there were already signs that Noem’s authority was narrowing.

 

Immigration policy, a central plank of Trump’s agenda, was increasingly being driven from the White House, where Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has long been a central architect of the administration’s mass deportation efforts.

 

At the same time, Tom Homan, the president’s border adviser, took on a direct operational role in Minnesota after the fatal shooting of two Americans — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — in January sparked protests and national outcry.

 

Even after the Minnesota episode, Trump had continued to publicly express confidence in Noem. She had been one of the administration’s most loyal and visible cabinet officials and the public face of the immigration crackdown, appearing in enforcement videos, touring El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison with cameras and defending the policies before Congress and in TV interviews.

 

Still, her performance at this week’s Congressional hearings highlighted particularly strong criticism from lawmakers in both the Democratic and Republican parties, while generating a series of damaging headlines. She was questioned about her relationship with longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, declining to directly answer if it was sexual in nature, and about a dispute with DHS’s inspector general over access to records tied to ongoing investigations.

 

“She was simply unfit for the role,” said Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina on Thursday. Earlier in the week, he had grilled Noem on Capitol Hill and called her leadership at DHS a “disaster.”