The Senator Who Cost Kristi Noem Her Job |
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which beat the spike in gas prices by loadin’ up dozens of trash bags with sweet, sweet unleaded a week ago. It’s a thing of beauty, seeing them all lined up here in front of us by the fireplace.
There were three politics stories this week: the Iran war, the Texas primaries, and Homeland Security drama. That’s it. The Iran war was (and is) the biggest of all of these, but we’re not leading the newsletter with it. Needs a little seasoning. OK, one other thing happened in politics this week—the Montanans all went nuts—but that’s it. There were four politics stories this week.
Let’s begin with the peculiar set of events that led to the firing of a Cabinet official.
The moment that finally pushed Kristi Noem out.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had been on thin ice within the administration for some time. The precipitating event that led to her ouster, though—the first such axing of a department head in Donald Trump’s second term—was the way she answered questions from Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy in a Tuesday hearing. Kennedy, who possesses degrees from Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia, and Oxford, can perform an effective I’m just a simple country lawyer routine when he wants to. And in this case, Kennedy, while probing Noem about an expensive DHS marketing campaign that filtered money (on no-bid deals) back to consultants in her orbit, got Noem to say that Trump greenlit the expenditure. This, as Kennedy later told reporters, made the president “mad as a murder hornet” when the two spoke later that day. Trump fired Noem on Thursday.
This is not the response you’d expect when a Republican senator goes after a Trump administration official during a hearing. You’d expect Trump to yell at that senator, and trash him on social media, for daring to so publicly call a member of the Greatest Cabinet Ever Assembled corrupt. Kennedy told a reporter separately that he had given the White House a heads-up days before the hearing that he was going to grill Noem, and we know that Noem has made a lot of enemies in the administration. Perhaps the White House wasn’t just understanding but encouraging of Kennedy’s plan when he reached out.
We never thought we’d be sentimental for the first Trump term. But the president’s firing of Noem via social media as she was giving a press conference—while conferring on her the title of “special envoy for the Shield of the Americas” as a goody bag on the way out—takes us back to sunnier days of 2017–18 messiness. Similarly, the Senate GOP found out when Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt read Trump’s post, in which he announced that Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne........