Kristi Noem’s law-and-order pitch is collapsing

The rumors that Kristi Noem is about to get fired won’t go away, and it’s no wonder. The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to be the face of Donald Trump mass deportations, which he said would bring “law and order.” Instead, everywhere she goes, the former South Dakota governor brings chaos.

The havoc Noem brings is most obvious when it comes to her deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to blue cities as a paramilitary force rather than a law enforcement agency. The secretary has worked to make herself the face of these invasions, which have invariably led to pandemonium. In recent weeks, America has watched as agents have tear gassed civilians, made race-based arrests that have scooped up citizens and even small children, and sent two non-violent citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, to their graves.

As a presidential candidate in 2024, Trump billed himself as the savior who would end crime and bring order to what he falsely portrayed as a turbulent social landscape due to imaginary immigrant crime sprees. While the president appears to personally enjoy the violence and unrest his homeland security secretary has unleashed, even he can see the polling that shows it is backfiring. But this was inevitable, especially with Noem at the helm. Her personal behavior in office has been as bizarre as her theory that masked federal agents terrorizing innocents would read as bringing order to the public. More than anyone besides Trump himself, Kristi Noem is responsible for the current DHS funding shutdown.

To fully understand just how much she has blown it for Trump, it’s crucial to realize how closely the MAGA movement justifies itself and the president’s excesses with the concept of “order.” Despite being a convicted felon and boasting a staggering number of criminal indictments, civil judgments and two impeachments, Trump constantly invokes “law and order” terminology. But this rhetoric is everywhere.

In a recent video about ICE, MAGA podcast host Tucker Carlson argued that “chaos is the realm of Satan” and “God created order,” but that the left, being apparently Satanic, “wanted the chaos.” Before his death in September, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted an idealized drawing of 1950s-era white families, arguing that having a family “the greatest act of rebellion against the chaos of our modern world.” Evangelical influencer Allie Beth Stuckey frequently falls back on defending ICE’s excesses by saying “God is a God of order” and that “God placed us not in a jungle, but in a garden.”

This rhetoric doesn’t just appeal to authoritarians with serious control issues; it works on a lot of people who may otherwise chafe at anti-freedom arguments. Embedded in all this talk of order is a promise of safety.

The irony is that Noem herself is not an orderly person. All reports suggest that, under her management, DHS has become a disaster zone, from the lack of standards or training for ICE officers to serious in-fighting unleashed by her aggressive but dim-witted management techniques. Then there’s the colorful gossip that underscores how Noem’s life is a roiling storm that creates chaos wherever she goes.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative report into Noem’s reign at DHS. It starts with her semi-official aide, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, with whom she is rumored to be having an affair. The secretary and her adviser, who are married to other people, have denied the rumors, but the Journal reported that “people said they do little to hide their relationship inside the department.” The pair clearly reinforce each other’s ugliest tendencies. At one point, Lewandowski fired a Coast Guard pilot in a fit of pique because Noem’s favorite blanket wasn’t on her taxpayer-funded private plane. But the pilot was soon rehired because they didn’t have anyone else to fly the plane.

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Such erratic, entitled behavior impacts everything in DHS. Noem and Lewandowski assumed videos of ICE officers brutalizing the public would be politically beneficial, so they encouraged agents to film themselves in action. But the public reaction has been more negative than they expected, especially with the killings and arrests of minors, including five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. Now the secretary and her aide are lashing out at underlings for simply following their orders.

There’s a larger lesson here. While authoritarians promise that strict hierarchies giving those at the top total control are necessary to keep people safe, the opposite is true. Unchecked power creates chaos. In this kind of political system, leaders have no accountability; they can behave unpredictably and cruelly, safe in the knowledge that those they harm have no recourse. That’s true of Lewandowski firing a pilot and of Noem punishing underlings for following her bad orders. It’s true of ICE agents killing people, arresting citizens or beating up protesters, all because they believe they are immune from any consequences. More broadly, it’s true of every hierarchy the right wants to impose on us. Male dominance leads to women being raped and beaten. White supremacy leads to racial violence, including lynchings of Black Americans during Jim Crow or more recent killings, such as the 2020 police death of George Floyd.

Some voters are starting to see how Trump and Noem’s authoritarianism is making them less safe. On Tuesday, Thomas Edsall of the New York Times published a lengthy analysis demonstrating that the administration’s racist policies have stripped away the boost of support Trump got in 2024 from Black and Latino voters. The president has also seen large drops in his approval rating with women, which is down to 32% in a recent Associated Press poll.

In 2024, Trump didn’t win a majority of any of these groups, but he shored up just enough support to get him over the top in the presidential election. He was able to overcome a lot of people’s doubts about his racism and misogyny with promises that his bigotries were part of a larger “tough” package that would bring order and safety. He explicitly promised women and minorities that his anti-immigration policies would “protect” them from the supposed threat posed by outsiders. Now it’s becoming clear that the real danger is coming from Trump and his lackeys, including Noem.

True to his nature, the president refuses to see this reality. On Monday, he blamed Democrats for DHS’s funding shutdown, insisting it has “nothing to do with Republicans.” But this is delusional. The two people most to blame are himself and Noem. This time last year, Trump had high approval ratings on immigration, as people had bought into the lie that his and Noem’s plan was to impose order and reduce crime. Instead, under their chaotic leadership, sections of once-peaceful American cities like Minneapolis have now come to look more like war zones.

ICE acts more like gangsters than law enforcement, terrorizing and kidnapping innocent folks and even shooting people who aren’t doing anything wrong. Being subjected to Mafia-style rule is not “safety.” Finally, the public is waking up to that reality.