Donald Trump has selected South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as his next Secretary of Homeland Security, CNN reported Tuesday.

In the flurry of horrific appointments for a second Trump term, that may not seem to qualify as good news—and really it doesn’t—but this appointment isn’t as bad as it might’ve been.

Noem has her issues, to be sure. She was banned from more than 16 percent of her own state after she suggested Native American tribal leaders were catering to drug cartels. She killed her chance at being Trump’s vice presidential nominee after she bragged about executing her family’s dog. She was caught lying about meeting with foreign leaders. She also didn’t appear to know that Texas wasn’t one of the 13 original colonies, during an interview on Fox News.

Noem: Texas and the 13 original colonies would have never signed the treaty that formed the first constitution of the United States if they didn't think their right to protect themselves was protected pic.twitter.com/i80SMdlcqE

Still, it could have been worse.

Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon floated another name for the gig last week: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for parroting extremist conspiracy theories, who recently suggested that Democrats had used weather manipulation to create Hurricane Helene.

One week since Election Day and roughly three months since he joined the campaign in earnest, and Elon Musk is already rubbing Donald Trump’s team the wrong way.

The world’s richest man has reportedly spent “nearly every single day” of the last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to CNN. Musk has been spotted golfing with the president-elect, dining with him and his wife, Melania, and has even been in the room while Trump phones world leaders, hopping on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday.

And while the Tesla CEO will likely not hold a Cabinet position in the forthcoming administration due to his companies, he’s playing no small role in staffing it—something that has particularly frustrated Trump’s transition team, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher. Swisher noted that Musk’s ongoing presence at the resort has some members of Trump’s entourage viewing him as the “guest that wouldn’t leave.”

“He definitely inserts himself all the time, that’s his style,” Swisher explained about the South African billionaire to CNN on Monday. “I’ve heard from Trump people, calling me saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is odd’. And it is.”

But, as Swisher notes, that will keep happening until Trump throws him out.

Musk and his policies will be the likely benefactor of his extended stay with the president-elect, whose opinion is famously swayed by whomever he last interacted with. But, according to Swisher, the relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen is destined to flame out.

“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump, who just won the election,” Swisher said. “You know he owes things to Elon, but at some point, you know if he takes too much of the attention—think about Steve Bannon. You remember he was on the cover of that magazine and how quickly he got out, even though he was critical to Trump’s first campaign and he was right in the middle of the White House, and then he wasn’t.

“Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially,” Swisher continued. “And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”

Arizonans have elected Representative Ruben Gallego as the next senator of the Grand Canyon State, according to the Associated Press. Gallego clinched 50 percent of the votes, besting far-right darling and local TV news anchor Kari Lake by 2.2 percent with 95 percent of the state reporting.

Bipartisan polls stretching back to July had placed Gallego squarely in the lead, sometimes with a double-digit jump on the former news anchor.

“Gracias, Arizona!” Gallego wrote on X late Monday night.

Gallego’s win will revert both of Arizona’s upper chamber seats back to the liberal party. After running as a Democrat in 2018, Senator Kyrsten Sinema—whom Gallego will replace—opted to become an independent, citing partisan extremism as her reasoning for the intra-office switch-up in an Arizona Republic op-ed. Earlier this year, Sinema announced she would not be seeking reelection, skirting a three-way race in the swing state.

Gallego’s victory is a bright spot for Democrats, who have lost control of the Senate to Republicans. The GOP holds 53 seats in the chamber.

Lake launched herself into the far-right stratosphere in 2022, when she made a national splash in Arizona’s gubernatorial race as a disciple of Donald Trump, carving her own candidacy out of mimicking the Republican presidential nominee’s bombastic and divisive rhetoric. Her narrow loss in that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs appeared to indicate that the MAGA tide had dried up in Arizona, but the state still voted for Trump this time around.

In the final months of the race, Gallego and Lake’s matchup boiled down to a handful of issues plaguing voters in the state, including........

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