As I looked at Kristi Noem’s MAGA-fied visage plastered across the media on Thursday, along with the news that President Trump had fired her, I couldn’t help thinking: This was always going to end in tears.
Not because the defenestrated secretary of homeland security was uniquely bad at her job. Sure, “ICE Barbie,” as her critics dubbed her, was no paragon of competence. Her handling of ICE agents’ bloody rampage across Minneapolis was appalling — as, really, was her aggressive defense of the president’s entire deportation orgy. (That photo op field trip to the Salvadoran prison? Pure trash.) Her leadership style was, at best, chaotic. Her congressional testimony this week was defensive, dishonest, bumbling and self-contradictory. Her relentless self-promotion was embarrassing and more than a little foolish given who she works for. Rule No. 1 in Trumpworld: Never steal the spotlight from the boss.
Still, Ms. Noem was hardly the most incompetent, embarrassing or dangerous member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. The competition is too steep.
No, I thought about how she owed her post to her laborious transformation into a particular kind of ultra-MAGA woman who kicks butt while always looking picture perfect — superfeminine and superaggressive — a role that comes with built-in challenges and limited room for error. The more furiously Ms. Noem contorted herself to fit this Trumpworld mold and catch the attention of the MAGA guys, the more she risked earning the contempt of the very people she wanted to impress, especially the president. Then, when she outlasted her usefulness, she was casually sloughed off.
Who could have predicted that one? Besides everyone.
Respect never seemed to be part of the equation with Mr. Trump and Ms. Noem. It’s hard to respect someone so eager to remake herself for your attention. Her physical MAGA makeover may be the most striking of any senior figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit. More disturbing was her scramble to prove herself the toughest cookie in the jar.
The most haunting stories from her 2024 memoir are on this theme. Her shooting her puppy. Her making up a story about meeting Kim Jong-un. Her claiming that Nikki Haley once psychologically menaced her, sending the message that “there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight” and that Ms. Haley wanted to make sure Ms. Noem knew her “place.”
It’s not hard to imagine why an ambitious woman might adopt an exaggerated, tough persona to fit in with a movement defined by chest thumping so heavy-handed it smells like misogyny. But Ms. Noem’s desperation to turn herself into a glambot enforcer was always just … sad.
It surely did nothing to help the secretary’s sense of self-worth that no one in the administration, much less the larger political world, took her seriously in her post. She was the face of an immigration policy that everyone assumed was being driven by the White House aide Stephen Miller and others, and presumably will continue to be.
But here’s where Ms. Noem really did herself in. With her high profile and her efforts to prove how hard-core she was — for instance, accusing the two Americans gunned down by immigration officials in Minneapolis of being domestic terrorists — she made herself a perfect scapegoat for the administration’s unpopular immigration agenda. No matter that some of her worst moments came as she tried to defend Mr. Trump’s morally indefensible policies. The president can now claim credit for firing a very bad employee, even as he and Mr. Miller continue promoting chaos and brutality.
It surely stings to be the first member of this cabinet to get the ax. Not Pete Hegseth? Pam Bondi? Lori Chavez-DeRemer? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? But Ms. Noem can take solace in knowing she is not the first ambitious woman who tried to remake herself in the MAGA image only to be misused and ultimately discarded.
Elise Stefanik, a U.S. House member from New York, has traveled a similarly humiliating road. One of her party’s rising stars in the pre-Trump era, Ms. Stefanik followed the president down the dark MAGA path, visions of higher office dancing in her head. But time and again, she had her dreams sacrificed to Mr. Trump’s political needs — first her aborted nomination to the United Nations, then her aborted campaign for governor. She will leave the House at the end of this term with little to show for her self-debasement other than a reputation for shape shifting and sycophancy.
As Ms. Noem is finding out, it’s hard out there for a MAGA woman. You have to jump through trickier hoops than the men to get attention, but your efforts to please can work against you. The second your swaggering performance becomes a problem, the president kicks you to the curb. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, after falling out with the president, fled the House and is now devoting herself to viciously critiquing his Iran policy.
Maybe Ms. Noem should consider a similar route, using her newfound freedom to tell the public how she really feels about what she was asked to do and defend in Mr. Trump’s name. She might even claw back some of that self-worth she gave up along the way.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
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