Thousands gather for People’s March on Washington

Kristi Noem deserved to get axed. After ignoring thousands of stories of officers detaining American citizens in violent, indiscriminate, unconstitutional roundups, posing for a gleeful photo-op at a hellacious El Salvadoran prison, labeling American protesters as domestic terrorists, and lying under oath multiple times, Democrats and even many Republicans lauded her exodus. Still, in what was a brief, volatile tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security, Noem transformed the agency charged with the protection of the American people into a theater for performative cruelty. Now, as the door hits Noem on the way out, it is important to note that her ouster was not a triumph of ethics or the law or even a sudden recollection of what competence looks like. Despite no lack of legitimate grounds for dismissal, most sources say the final straw was a $220 million ad blitz, possibly complicated by an alleged affair with her adviser. But who among Trump’s inner circle doesn’t come with a laundry list of wasteful spending and personal embarrassments? The rest of the Cabinet is chock full of unqualified Trump-loyalists demonstrating incompetence so regularly that in any other era they would have all resigned or been canned long ago. Given the purported reasons Noem was ultimately fired, and where the conversation has lingered since, to the untrained eye, it seems like Noem may have been the first to get the boot, at least in part because she’s not a man.

There’s nothing Noem did that another member of the cabinet or Trump himself couldn’t top. Consider the shameful tenure of our Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, who engaged in intimate business deals with Epstein years after Epstein’s first conviction, and even planned family vacations to his private island. While Noem is fired for a $220 million ad buy, Lutnick remains the face of American business, despite once being in business with a convicted sex trafficker and lying about it. And our wannabe-fraternity-pledgemaster Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is, if possible, an even greater liability. Hegseth breached security protocol in his second month on the job and oversaw a record $93 billion of spending in a single month, $9 million going to king crab and lobster tails, and $15 million to ribeye steaks. More gravely, in his zeal to project “lethality," Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation programs by 90 percent; shortly thereafter, on his watch, in what is the most devastating single military error in modern history, the U.S. fired a Tomahawk missile into a school full of children, killing at least 168 children and 14 teachers. Noem may have turned federal agents against American civilians (which is not why she was fired), but Hegseth is committing war crimes around the globe.