Donald Trump Is the Worst DHS Secretary in History
INSIDE: Kristi Noem ... Pete Hegseth ... Lindsey Halligan
Kristi Noem Was a Mere Cipher
I found myself going from indifferent to slightly confounded by the reaction to President Trump’s firing of Kristi Noem as DHS secretary.
In the old days of a less homogenous Republican Party, a change of cabinet secretary might mark a shift toward or away from one alliance or another. It might stress an internal party tension point along regional, cultural, or ideological differences. It might usher one coalition into power and another out. It might represent a policy change or a tonal adjustment.
Even back then it wasn’t likely to matter that much, but if you were into nuance there were things to sort through. Now, with the Republican Party in lock step with a Trump White House that micromanages every department and agency, the identity of which particular reality TV cast member (literally in the case of Sean Duffy at the Transportation Department) occupies which position in the cabinet is without much real meaning.
Noem is out. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin is in. But there is an endless supply of other figureheads for Trump to name to nominally run DHS, while he and Stephen Miller via Tom Homan pull the strings from the West Wing. The mass deportation operation for which no one is more responsible than Donald Trump grinds on mercilessly and lawlessly.
Is Noem the worst DHS secretary in history? As with Pam Bondi’s historically bad run as attorney general, it feels like an inapt point. They are ciphers, meant to fill a TV role cast by Trump and to respond to his every whim and impulse, not run giant organizations or make independent decisions. Donald Trump is the worst DHS secretary in history, and worst attorney general and … you get the point.
There is a tendency in news coverage to reward Trump by covering the action — a firing — rather than his failure on every level. It results in a weird herd-like dynamic where everyone piles on to reject the obviously foolish person who was fired and thereby associate themselves with the powerful actor who did the firing. Which is, well, insane here and in the many other instances of Trump’s serial firings of officials who do exactly what he said in the way that he directed it done for the reasons he articulated.
In some ways I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a guy whose entire political persona is rooted in performative firings on a reality TV show. That formula resonates for a lot of Americans, as much as I wish it were otherwise.
The mass deportation operation is Trump’s singular political obsession for his entire time in national politics. It would have happened with or without Kristi Noem. It will continue until Trump and Trump alone decides otherwise.
The Kafkaesque Brutality
A Colombian reporter working in the United States while seeking political asylum here was detained in Nashville this week and quickly shipped off to Louisiana for allegedly missing two meetings with ICE, one of which was cancelled by the January ice storm and the other of which she claims ICE told her she didn’t have to attend.
‘Christian Nations Under God’
Addressing representative of countries in the Western Hemisphere yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth let his white nationalist flag fly:
The Latest From the Middle East …
Before we dive into the news, a reminder that Iran is much larger than most Americans realize. Comparing it to European countries as a frame of reference, only Russia and Ukraine occupy a larger land area. Iran’s population is larger than those of Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain.
U.S. military investigators “believe it is likely” that the United States was responsible for Saturday’s strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran, Reuters reports, citing two unnamed U.S. officials. The NYT’s own analysis indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as U.S. attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The U.S. sinking of the IRIS Dena (an Iranian frigate, not a destroyer, as I described it earlier this week) has complicated relations with third countries. It has caused consternation in India, from where the ship was returning (unarmed, the Iranians say) after joint military exercise that included U.S. participation. Three Australian nationals were embedded with the U.S. military aboard the submarine that sank the Iranian warship.
Israel launched an assault on Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
Four Democrats joined the House GOP majority to block a war powers resolution that would have asserted some congressional independence from President Trump.
Florida Bar Investigates Lindsey Halligan
In a letter to an advocacy group that had filed a complaint against former interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the Florida Bar said an investigation of her was already pending. The NYT first obtained the letter, which offers no details about the investigation.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
House Republicans are pressing the Trump DOJ to bring criminal charges against Trump I White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, who became the star witness of the Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings, CNN reports. In recent days, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) made a bogus criminal referral of Hutchinson case to the Justice Department, accusing her of lying in her congressional testimony.
Virginia Democrats have passed a bill that Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is expected to sign that would bar schools from teaching that the Jan. 6 attach was a peaceful demonstration or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election.
2026 Ephemera
TX-Sen: President Trump is poised to endorse Sen. John Cornyn (R) for re-election in the GOP primary runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
TX-23: While the dark sex scandal around Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) dragged out for weeks, the end came rather quickly. On Tuesday, he was forced into a runoff in the GOP primary. On Wednesday, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Gonzales, and he admitted to the affair with a former staffer who took her own life. On Thursday, the House GOP leadership yesterday called for him to end his re-election campaign, which he finally did late last night.
MT-Sen: TPM’s Kate Riga on Montana Sen. Steve Daines deceiving voters and gifting his seat to his chosen GOP heir.
Jeffrey Epstein Watch
The Trump DOJ has released previously withheld FBI interviews with a woman who alleges that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s after being introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein. The woman claims she was between 13 and 15 years old when Trump hit her after she bit his penis when he attempted to force her to perform oral sex. The White House called the allegation “completely baseless” and attacked the credibility of the unnamed accuser.
‘Low Rhythm Rising’
One of the biggest surprises in writing Morning Memo has been the response I’ve gotten from occasionally dipping into music. I’ve said before, but I cannot emphasize enough, how remedial of a music fan I am. Embarrassingly so. It’s been a lifelong gap in my personal development. But summoning the courage, at the risk of public mortification, to share a little of what I like, has yielded remarkably rich interactions with MM readers.
Case in point: When I was in Nashville last week covering the Abrego Garcia case, a MM reader reached out and invited me over for a tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame’s new exhibit on Muscle Shoals. “I know you’re a music guy,” he said. Rather than raise a protest, I just let that misimpression go and dove into the experience.
The exhibit really landed with me, indulging in nostalgia as you would expect, but without flattening the complexities of that time and place. The curators collected way more memorabilia than I would have expected still existed, including the piano that was used at FAME Studios for most of the 1960s and on which Aretha Franklin famously played her first hit: “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” To set the vibe, a lot of faux wood grain is used to evoke the cheap midcentury paneling that was inside the studios.
The exhibit reaches well beyond the narrowest definitions of country music to draw out how the Muscle Shoals influence threads across musical genres, generations, and racial divides. It maps the influence like a family tree that shows the Muscle Shoals musical DNA still persisting decades after it first emerged in the northwest corner of Alabama.
If you can’t make it yourself, here’s a good peek at what you’re missing:
Please continue your valuable and very important work. Thank you.
The Country Music Hall of Fame is an exceptional museum. Well designed (especially compared to the Rock Hall), an interesting array of exhibits and some really wonderful special events. So glad you were able to experience it.