Trump ousts Noem, taps Senate ally to lead DHS

What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and said he would seek to replace her with Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a close ally and supporter of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Noem’s abrupt ouster was the first Cabinet-level sacking of Trump’s second term, and follows months of mounting criticism over her spending of taxpayer money on ads and luxury jets, her handling of ICE’s violent immigration crackdown in Minnesota and her personal conduct.

Who said what

The “ice under Noem was getting thinner and thinner” even before she “made two humiliating appearances before House and Senate committees” this week, Axios said. But Trump decided to fire her following the televised “bipartisan probing about alleged mismanagement of DHS, her self-promotion at huge taxpayer expense and even a rumored extramarital affair” with top aide Corey Lewandowski that she “refused to deny” under oath.

The “immediate catalyst” for Noem’s firing appeared to be her “under-threat-of-perjury statements” that Trump had approved “tens of millions of dollars of government ads in which she was prominently featured,” The New York Times said. That $220 million campaign “had already rankled the president for months for its self-promotional style,” The Wall Street Journal said, and he was “livid” about Noem’s testimony. “I never knew anything about it,” Trump told Reuters on Thursday.

After Wednesday’s hearing, Lewandowski “tried to calm the president down in a White House meeting,” the Journal said, but the “last-ditch effort to save Noem’s job failed” and Trump fired her “in a phone call minutes before she took the stage” for a speech yesterday. “She burnt up a ton of goodwill,” an adviser who spoke with Trump told Axios. “It was everywhere. It was everything.”

What next?

Mullin “appeared just as caught off guard by the announcement as the rest of Washington,” Fox News said. He is “likely to get confirmed easily by his former colleagues in the Senate,” Semafor said. Trump said on social media he was making Noem his “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas.” Shuffling her into this “new, and previously nonexistent, role” instead of firing her outright underscores Trump’s “desire to keep anyone who might be disaffected inside the tent,” said the Times.