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Kristi Noem is out as DHS Secretary
Noem is the first Cabinet Secretary to shuffle out of Trump's second admin. Notably, the first Trump admin set records for modern cabinet turnover, and of course Trump is looking to beat those numbers.
Noem faced a number of controversies during her tenure, most of which we argued about at some point, from ICE tactics to ad campaigns given sweetheart deals. Recently she was grilled on a $143mm contract given no-bid to a firm recently created by people tied to the secretary; and allegations she was schtupping her second in command Lewandowski.
Trump says he's appointing her to some kind of sinecure at some new international organization he's creating next weekend.
Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin will replace her. I have to admit, if you had asked me who Markwayne Mullin was, I would have bet $1000 he was a black kid who played defensive line in the SEC, what kind of name is Markwayne anyway?
So what does this tell us about the state of the Trump administration? Turnover is generally bad, but I don't really see why Trump is firing her at this time. I suppose that "When we talk about fraud, we just mean that it should be HERITAGE AMERICANS stealing from the treasury, not Somalis..." is a tough sell? Does this indicate, along with Bovino's ouster, that ICE enforcement is going to take a step back, or change tactics? Combined with the war in Iran, which now will likely last until September according to the Pentagon, does Noem's firing indicate a reshuffling of priorities away from purging immigration domestically and towards classic neocon internationalism
Dogs across the country are very satisfied with this result.
Strikes me as GenX Jimbob, personally, but YMMV.
Seems to be, and I say this with love because I'm rural white lower-class myself, rural white lower-class naming:
So instead of calling him "Mark (first name) Wayne (middle name)" or "Wayne (first name) Mark (middle name)", Mom called him "MarkWayne" (or the idiot registrar filling out the birth certificate did). I can see Mom not wanting to choose between which brother would be the first name, but come on now. Either "Mark Wayne" or "Wayne Mark". If the official name on his birth cert was put down as "Markwayne" then okay, he's stuck with it if he hasn't chosen to change it himself.
EDIT: Apparently he is also Cherokee (excuse me coughing into my fist here) so yeah. Lizzie Warren is not the only "great-grandma was a Cherokee princess!" out there đ Feck's sake, look at this guy's photo. I was betting on "Mullin is kinda Irish, he could be one of our own", I was not thinking "Ah yes, clearly an Indigenous descendant".
At least that has a requirement- enrolled citizens have to prove direct descent from at least one person on the Dawes Roll. He's probably about 1/16 or 1/32 Cherokee 'officially', though yeah features are much more Irish/American mutt.
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A month ago the airspace around El Paso was closed because a military AA system shot down a DHS drone. Probably not relevant, but you never know with this administration.
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Anyone else reminded of the Special Military Operation?
I think the more on point precedent is Thomas Friedman's six months to stabilise Iraq. You lose a winnable war one Friedman unit at a time.
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The hardest part of a two week war is the first six years.
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It's not nearly that bad - we don't have Ranger battalions losing pitched battles to armed civilians - but it reflects the same basic mindset and strategic ineptitude. It's just that the US has greater technological and operational competence to compensate.
It seems fairly likely to me that, as with Putin in Ukraine, the Trump administration expected IRI resolve to crumble immediately in the face of overwhelming power, and are fumbling now that it hasn't.
Iran seems to have crossed a threshold of corruption that Ukraine managed to just barely avoid. Russia thought it knew everything before going in, Israel seems to have actually known everything.
It's often forgotten, but Ukraine was fighting a low-intensity conventional war against Russian proxies for eight years before the big Russian invasion in 2022, which put a lot of pressure on their military to sort itself out. The ZSU performed quite poorly in 2014, IIRC. Meanwhile, Russia basically sabotaged its own military reforms. The result was that their plans combined both strategic and operational incompetence, leading to the disastrous early days of the war. Russian planners assumed Ukrainian resistance would disintegrate and the Ukrainian state would collapse. They were operating on delusional assumptions about how Ukraine would react and what their own forces were capable of. At least at the outset of the war, Ukrainian troops appear to have been qualitatively superior, and while Russia had (and has) a number of capabilities Ukraine can't match, they didn't have the intel to use them effectively.
To compare and contrast, the US appears to have had similarly delusional strategic expectations, but can at least lean on the fact that the US military is really good at the nuts and bolts of combat while Iran has fairly limited ability to come to grips with the US and is way behind qualitatively. I don't know if this is a function of corruption or just the inherent deficiencies of a regime of globally isolated religious fanatics more concerned with internal security than defense.
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https://youtube.com/watch?v=S-sqsvcZJ2w
Forgot who shared this bop before.
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I'm also getting the vibe that the military is hiding how much damage they've taken. We know that missiles are getting through, but we haven't heard a casualty report since the first strike on Kuwait.
Reports are that Iran has hit one of our THAAD radars. These cost over $500 million and we only have(had) 13.
Material maybe, but I think that dead servicemen would probably bail Trump out of this one public opinion wise, wouldn't it?
If Iran sinks a USN ship with significant casualties, Americans will be baying for blood.
I'm not sure. It's more like that's a Schrodinger event - will Americans bay for blood, or will half be screeching for Trump's blood and half posting boomer memes about demanding blood in order to get engagement?
Yes, I'd imagine there will be a significant amount of people saying "this is Trump's fault, and proof he should be impeached and we should pay reparations to Iran." Likely amplified by foreign sockpuppets and bots and propaganda, but let's be honest, it doesn't really need to be. A lot of people don't have a good relationship with anyone in the military, less of an idea as to how military or geopolitics works, and whatever remains is--on both sides--subsumed by partisan politics, the mind-killer.
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She didnât have any major wins and she isnât the architect of the immigration and deportation policy in any case.
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My guess is that it has something to do with that contract. All the other criticisms have been around for some time, and Trump doesn't seem to have been fazed by them. Incidentally, this reminds me of an interaction I had with a Chapter 7 client when I started doing them on the side around 2016. This woman had like 13 credit cards and had absolutely no financial literacy. That isn't exactly uncommon, and in those cases I ended up giving them a crash course on the topic. She told me she wanted to reaffirm a debt, and the following conversation ensued:
Me: You can't just decide to reaffirm a debt. That's up to the trustee. Which debt were you thinking of reaffirming? (I wouldn't agree to help them reaffirm debts except under special rare conditions; the couple I did were on loans for cars that weren't worth a lot of money and had low balances. Otherwise it's almost always a bad idea. Most reaffirmations are for car loans generally.)
Her: I was thinking I should keep the Toys R Us card (reaffirming a credit card debt is almost unheard of)
Me: Why?
Her: Just to have it around in case of an emergency.
Me: There's no such thing as an emergency toy purchase.
To be fair to the woman, I understood her logic: This card only had a balance of like $350 and was the only one that wasn't in arrears. It would haveen trivial for her to keep it and pay it off, and she wanted to have it around in case something unexpected happened and she needed money. It also had a limit of $500 or $1000 or something similarly small, so it couldn't get her into that much trouble. I explained to her that, regardless of the wisdom of the decision or the trustee's willingness to allow it, reaffirming didn't create an obligation to allow her to keep the card, and they would probably cancel it anyway. In fact, they would probably cancel it even if she didn't have a balance on it. In any event, this case was a confidence-builder for me because she ended up doing pretty well. She made a decent income but spent a good chunk of it on credit card bills that were killing her. Once those were wiped out she was able to start saving. She also had what I called The Exacta: She surrendered a newer Nissan Altima and went back to using a 15-year-old Grand Am that had been sitting in her driveway.
Anyway, I bring this up because I busted out laughing and thought of this when I read that Noem said that they didn't put the contract out for bid because of the declared emergency. Sorry Kristi, there's no such thing as an emergency ad campaign.
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She has had many scandals, she comes across as an idiot, and she hasn't had any really any wins. I don't think we can really read into this as a policy change when her performance has been so poor.
The timing really seems to be due to the senate hearing, she had a very bad showing because she has a bad record. She got hit from both sides of the aisle.
I would say Bovino got outed for similar reasons - too many fuck ups and not enough wins to overcome those fuck ups.
They already have the funding for ICE expansion, I don't see them changing course on what was arguably Trumps biggest issue.
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âI have to admit, if you had asked me who Markwayne Mullin was, I would have bet $1000 he was a black kid who played defensive line in the SEC, what kind of name is Markwayne anyway?â
âTurnover is generally badâŚâ
If he was a defensive lineman, it would be good.
Hopefully he's got strong nuclear football security, given that he's taking over DHS in the middle of an active conflict with a country well known for sponsoring terrorism. Especially given that the DNI appears to be frozen out because of an accusation so bad they don't even know how to talk about it.
I asked Grok about this, and it came up with this (unverified):
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One has to wonder what the issue with Gabbard is, given the Trump admin's otherwise general lack of sensitivity to scandal.
The reporting is that the issue is so sensitive that even disclosing it to Congress is impossible.
So give it another month before it's on the WarThunder forums.
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How is Gabbard still employed at this point? The administration seems to have frozen her out of everything, her pacifist wing has lost the battle of influence within the administration, and she doesn't placate any voter base except Rogan listeners. And now there's this, which is probably nothing but is still something. I'm not sure what Trump gains by keeping her.
Gabbard seems to have the personal esteem of Trump, but not his court. If she was more belligerent publically, she would have been let go, but reducing her to sinecure to award a loyalist while keeping her out of power is a compromise. If it becomes advantageous to be dovish, she can be promoted forward.
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If nothing else she's useful to keep around in a visible role rhetorically, as she can be paraded as an example of Democrats moving so far left they're leaving their own behind.
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