'Unfathomably cruel' Kristi Noem is rapidly 'falling out of favor with Trump': report

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled "Worldwide Threats to the Homeland," on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S. December 11, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

Author Melissa Gira Grant argues President Donald Trump appears to be tiring of United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Before Trump’s second term, the idea that somebody like Noem would head the Department of Homeland Security seemed “beyond unlikely,” Grant writes in The New Republic. “But her cruelty once handed this power was foreseeable. If Noem’s name rang any bells for most people before the Senate confirmed her to head DHS this January (to their enduring shame), it was because she shot her 14-month-old dog to death in a gravel pit and included the grisly scene in her election-year memoir.”

“But while it might be tempting to dismiss her unfathomably cruel DHS tenure as try-hard MAGA toadying, or as rank incompetence, she’s actually well suited for this job,” said Grant. “At DHS, Noem can keep doing whatever it is her job is without much of a break at all from the agency’s violent history.”

However, Noem now seems to be falling out of favor with Trump, or at least with deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

“Reports circulated earlier this month [suggest] the administration is considering replacing her. At a wild hearing in early December, a number of Democratic lawmakers called for her resignation to her face.

Noem replied, “I will consider your asking me to resign as an endorsement of my work,” while enriching herself and her circle “starring in a series of DHS anti-immigrant ads, made by a company with long-standing ties to Noem, who were handed a $200 million DHS contract without competition.

Noem has also blown the agency’s budget purchasing planes for DHS to use for deportation flights, including two new luxury G700 Gulfstream jets for $200 million, and ten Boeing 737’s from a bankrupt budget airline, each without an engine, even as other, more vital agencies struggle to make ends meet.

But Grant says ICE Barbie, with her make-up, carefully curled hair and countless Hollywood-style tweaks, was a natural for DHS, “a young agency marked through its brief history by a multitude of f—— ups and abuses of power, ranging from its lethal insistence that white men cannot be terrorists to its catastrophic failures to respond to climate change-fueled disasters.”

Grant says Trump and Noem did not build the bumbling, money-hole agency they run, and “it will not be unmade merely by their departure alone — though it should be.”

Read the New Republic report at this link.

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