Critics of the now-ousted Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, have been quick to celebrate her departure and have mocked her new position as head of the Trump-created Shield of the Americas project. I wish I could be as sure as they are that the position is a meaningless consolation prize.
First, we obviously can’t assume Trump removed her from the Department of Homeland Security because he suddenly lost faith in its whole mission and realized that letting people travel wherever they please is a good, efficient, moral thing (as long as they land on the private property of willing hosts, such as employers, vendors, or renters).
Second, we can’t assume that a few high-profile deaths at the hands of DHS or Customs agents truly horrified Trump. To all but his most devoted fans, it’s obvious the man likes punitive cruelty and those who are willing to dish it out in the course of their high-level government or corporate careers.
It seems more likely that Trump was troubled by the combination of Noem taking an ostentatious, celebrity-enhancing approach to her advertising the DHS mission (ironically, a Trump-like move, though in her case involving more horseback riding in wide open western spaces) and making lavish use of DHS funds, awarding contracts to friends of her associates and associates of her friends, sometimes to inexperienced companies run by them and summoned into existence mere days before the grant award was announced.
This happens a lot in government, including at housing agencies run by Democrats, lest we think it’s solely a side effect of Republican hate or something like that (in her case, the blind partisan might posit, a natural next step from shooting her own dog or separating Mexican families at the border). However, not every official implicated in such behavior gets stuck like a deer in headlights by tough questions from members of her own party, as Noem did in a recent Senate hearing.
Even now, Democrats may be planning midterm campaign ads showing her buckling under questioning. That costing the Republicans seats in Congress in a few months would be fine with me despite me half-heartedly rooting for the GOP at times in the past—when they sounded more interested in streamlining or eliminating government.
Noem may have been profligate with money and cruel to immigrants, even in embarrassing ways, but these behaviors still don’t necessarily disqualify one for all public offices in the mind of the President. And though it appears Noem had an extramarital affair with the thuggish Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s in no position to banish people for that sin. So, even if Trump felt public pressure to remove her from DHS, he was likely inclined to keep her around in some capacity, and not merely a symbolic one. She’s still “tough,” which is the polite way to describe what he likes.
Alas, then, we may end up regretting her sudden career transformation—despite the temptation to celebrate her toppling from DHS as a victory for libertarian and liberal norms, not to mention the small-government-conservative ones that existed until just a few years ago. Trump’s plainly not averse to rewriting the functions of government (and even its geographic confines) on the fly, and though the Shield of the Americas may sound like a phony, paper-tiger intergovernmental drug taskforce right now, it could easily become a vast, previously unauthorized locus of both authority and (not coincidentally) graft in the years ahead.
If the widespread corruption of U.S., not to mention Latin American, police departments has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that the less contact cross-border, hard-to-track, border-hopping police agents have with billions of dollars’ worth of drug money, the better. You’d think someone sloppy, possibly unethical, and narcissistically self-aggrandizing—not to mention comfortable with violent, authoritarian tactics—would be the last person you’d want overseeing the international drug trade (unless perhaps you were naïve enough still to believe that anti-drug agencies merely prevent drug trade rather than steering, redirecting, and routinely profiting from that trade).
Putting Noem in charge of a project that’s meant to span about a dozen North and South American nations instead of a Cabinet agency explicitly focused on the Homeland could just mean her ambitions, and Trump’s ambitions for her, grow, in the process uniting the two worst things (from a libertarian perspective) about U.S. government (and about the Republican Party): namely, a love of bossing people around domestically with cops and a love of frightening people beyond our borders with the military.
I fear Noem’ll still be in regular contact with War Secretary Hegseth as she turns her gaze across the Caribbean. As she devotes less and less of her time to worrying about domestic U.S. legal niceties, Trump’s New Right fanboys will probably talk less and less about the importance of avoiding far-flung foreign entanglements and avoiding “globalism.” So what if Noem moved money around as irresponsibly as those Somalis she swore to deport? Now she may kick even more Latin American ass than she did in her old position.
The New Right will probably gradually admit that they never cared too much whether the kicking was happening on our soil or the South Americans’ soil. You can’t follow a megalomaniacal president without having at least a little bit of would-be world-conqueror in your soul, the precise number of wars started or ended notwithstanding.
The hardcore Trumpers may not be bidding farewell to Noem and the horse she rode in on, merely wishing her “Buena suerte” before she heads south to further remake the world in Trump’s image.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.