Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.
You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.
Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.
With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.)
Holiday Barbie, as Robbie’s Cathy has been dubbed for her ostentatious dresses and hairstyles, pales in comparison with the costumes and Rapunzel extensions of ICE Barbie. Imprisoned in her marriage to Edgar Linton, Robbie’s Cathy gleams in elaborate gowns and necklaces. But Noem topped that. When she went to see migrants in prison in El Salvador, she sported a baseball cap with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement logo — and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona that’s worth $50,000.
Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.)
President Trump had rejected the plea of Lewandowski — who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign until he got fired after dust-ups with the Trump family and others — to be Noem’s chief of staff, because Trump was disturbed “by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved,” as The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer put it. (Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married with children, have denied the affair.)
Kristi slid Corey into the Department of Homeland Security as a temporary special government employee and made him her powerful aide-de-camp. He has stayed long beyond his allotted 130 days, thanks to scheming workarounds. For a time, Trump let it ride, even though, according to The New York Post, he cringed when he saw them flagrantly taking sips from the same can of soda — an unmistakable tell.
An Atlantic story called Lewandowski and Noem “the First Couple of a Dysfunctional D.H.S.” As Noem’s enforcer and promoter, Lewandowski had a hand in every decision.
An upcoming book by the NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley reveals that senior officials held a secret meeting in 2025 after Trump was sworn in to discuss what they saw as the toxic romance warping — or wuthering — the agency’s plans as it embarked on the barbaric roundup of illegal immigrants. The rough manhunt drained the department of compassion as it attempted to build up Noem and capture headlines. Lewandowski tried to think of ways to redeem Noem after she disgustingly called Renee Good and Alex Pretti, victims of her ICE run amok, domestic terrorists.
Like Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” Noem was aspirational, always trying to move up. Cathy traded up to the big house nearby; Kristi commandeered the Coast Guard commandant’s waterfront residence. But her tactics were too flashy and narcissistic even for Trump. She and Lewandowski jetted around in a luxury 737 Max, according to The Wall Street Journal, and once highhandedly tried to dismiss their Coast Guard pilot when he failed to transfer her blanket to a different plane. They had to get him back once they realized there was no one to fly them home. (Other accounts say it was her bag that was left. But what was in that bag that could cause such a ruckus?)
Axios reported that Noem had planned to use border funds for an almost $300 million luxury jet fleet for D.H.S.
It was the end for Noem when she was quizzed at her hearing on Tuesday by Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about spending $220 million on glossy commercials, including one where she wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse near Mount Rushmore.
She should have known better than to hog attention from the president, the biggest attention hog of all time.
A skeptical Kennedy pressed Noem about whether Trump had signed off on the ads, and she said that he had.
The senator reported that the president called him afterward “mad as a momma wasp,” denying he knew about the ads. At that moment, Kennedy said, “She was dead as fried chicken.”
Now Democrats are investigating whether Noem and Lewandowski gamed the system on the ad contract, which looks politically incestuous, so that they and their allies financially benefited. They’re also looking into whether she perjured herself.
At Noem’s intensely awkward House hearing on Wednesday, with her husband sometimes sitting behind her, she was grilled about Lewandowski.
“So, Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as director of Homeland Security, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?” Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a California Democrat, asked, calling Lewandowski “unqualified” for his job.
Noem called the subject “tabloid garbage.” But I didn’t hear a no.
In a way, this terrible love story is a triangle. Trump can’t quit Corey either, no matter how many times the pit bull is pushed aside. Trump sees his first campaign manager as a character, someone who had faith that his brash style could click, that America would adapt to Trump, not the other way around.
A Washington scandal involving sex is never very sexy. And it’s usually not simply about secret passion; repercussions ripple far beyond the carnal transgression. Institutions are betrayed and undermined, and so are the people who count on them.
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