In a presidential administration known for megalomania and testosterone, Kristi Noem exceeded the limit. Her heavily cosmeticized Annie Oakley act was showing up even the boss.

President Donald Trump has chosen to replace her as head of the massive Homeland Security Department—our ultimate guardians domestically—with the only guy in Washington who might be tougher. He also is the only guy in Congress known in recent times to have risen in an open committee hearing to engage in on-site fisticuffs with a testifying Teamsters president.

It was an “I’m standing my butt up; you stand your butt up” moment between the Teamsters boss and Oklahoma Republican U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a martial arts expert whom Trump took a shine to when he saw him talking tough on television.

It was in 2023 when Mullin got a chance in committee to question Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters, and, after whining about demeaning Twitter posts O’Brien had made about him from keyboard safety, reared up and seemed ready to tangle right then and there. Bernie Sanders, a gentle socialist and chairperson of the hearing, broke it up before the brawl began.

O’Brien now praises Mullin’s appointment to lead the agency.

Noem was wrong for the Homeland Security job because two innocent citizens of Minneapolis got killed by ICE agents and she fired off a quick statement that those two people were terrorists though they weren’t remotely that.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Mullin will do his enforcing himself. During the catastrophic American abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021, Mullin flew to Greece and sought Pentagon permission for air transportation close to Afghanistan from where he proposed to take a helicopter into Afghanistan to rescue a mother and four children. The Pentagon declined. Mullin went home. Conceivably, then, he can deal with reason eventually.

But what if there is no Pentagon backstop for the poo-bah of Homeland Security?

You also might remember something about Noem: Formerly governor of South Dakota, she breezed into the Cabinet at Trump’s beckoning to be lead exterminator of immigrants after she wrote self-admiringly in 2024 in her book “No Going Back” about shooting her family’s 14-month-old puppy, Cricket.

The pup had killed chickens and nipped at Noem, who was no puppy-coddling liberal. She wasn’t squeamish.

Just last week it was a Republican—albeit a lame-duck senator from North Carolina named Thom Tillis, who can’t stand Trump—who gave her what-for. In a committee hearing, he told Noem he trained dogs and that you don’t take an untrained puppy among fowl, much less kill it because you didn’t train it.

His point was that she handled ICE enforcement the way she handled Cricket.

Reports are that Trump dumped her not to avenge Cricket’s death. After all, he made her a vital Cabinet secretary maybe in part because of it.

And it was reportedly not because of her actions in those Minneapolis controversies, nor because of complaints that she diverted Homeland Security funds from other vital needs to pile money onto ICE, which in fact was done to please Trump.

It couldn’t have been because of her reported affair with former Trump confidant Corey Lewandowski and her bringing him into her agency on special assignment to travel with her, even as Noem’s husband stayed with her owing to his religious beliefs and perhaps his undying love. Trump knew about whatever that relationship was, and he is not known to be a stickler about marital fidelity.

Most of the media speculation centers on Noem’s rivaling Trump in self-obsessed self-celebration by spending $220 million in Homeland Security money for her own promotional advertising campaign showing her in tough-woman getups and poses including one on horseback with Mount Rushmore in the background. That’s where Trump is supposed to be as soon as he gets his own overdue Nobel Prize.

He also was said to be furious because she told a questioning senator in last week’s hearing that she and Trump had talked extensively about that video and that he knew all about it. He claimed not to recall any such thing.

As we know, the one thing Trump cannot abide is someone in his employ serving her interests instead of his.

Trump also didn’t think she was good on TV last week, and being good on TV is what sold Trump on her successor to protect our homeland.

Through it all, it may be that the problem at Homeland Security wasn’t Noem and won’t be about this Oklahoma brawler.

It could be all about the large guy shielded by Secret Service agents while he watches it all on Fox.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.

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