Noem No More: Democracy Still Works, Even in Donald Trump’s America

The proximate cause of her firing: She bruised the boss’s ever-fragile ego. But the important backdrop? The rising up of the American people against her.

We could all breathe a sigh of relief if Donald Trump had fired Kristi Noem for the right reasons. If, for example, Trump had determined that a Cabinet member who accused two American citizens of engaging in “domestic terrorism”—after they’d been shot at point-blank range by masked agents under her charge—had crossed a bright moral line, rendering said Cabinet member an unsalvageable liability, then we could all sleep a little easier.

But that’s what would happen on Earth 1. On the Earth 2 of Trump 2.0, Noem was fired—of course—for upstaging the boss and shifting blame for one of her errors onto him. The error was the $220 million ad campaign that featured images of Noem on horseback, sporting requisite high-end hat and jodhpurs, out where the buffalo once roamed, banging on about “freedom.” Under questioning from GOP Senator John Kennedy, she made the fateful mistake of saying that Trump had approved the ads. And that was all she wrote.

Well, as Johnny Rotten said when Elvis kicked it (quite unfairly, in that case), “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Outside of Stephen Miller, Noem is probably the purest fascist among Trump’s second-term frontline appointees. I say this because she understands spectacle, which is such a key element of the fascist worldview. The visual humiliation of those deemed to be human vermin by the regime in power sits at........

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