Kristi Noem is out of touch. She’ll be out of a job soon too
Kristi Noem seems to have an inappropriate outfit for every occasion: the US homeland security secretary sported camouflage leggings when meeting senior Chilean officials and donned lip gloss, earrings and bootcut jeans while joining an immigration raid in New York. Earlier this month, she appeared on a podium wearing a huge cowboy hat soon after the shooting of an unarmed mother of three in Minneapolis shocked America. In her yee-haw attire, the former governor of South Dakota and long-time Trump acolyte accused the dead woman of perpetrating “an act of domestic terrorism”. But it appears that her particular brand of brash, cosplay politics – with its made-for-TV production values and soundbites – has fallen out of favour.
Noem’s response to the shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on 7 January was already at odds with the concern felt among many ordinary Americans about the shooting of a fellow citizen on a quiet neighbourhood street.
Now, another American is dead, and once again Noem was quick to pass judgement with dramatic public pronouncements. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who cared for military veterans, was surrounded by ICE agents in Minneapolis on Saturday and shot dead at point blank range during a scuffle. It didn’t take long for Noem to get in front of the cameras and call Pretti a domestic terrorist intending to “inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement”. Americans heard her words, then watched multiple videos of a man with just a phone in his hand trying to protect a female bystander. Something didn’t add up.
So, apparently, did her boss. When asked if the president agreed with Noem’s words, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday said that she had not heard the president “characterise Mr Pretti in that way.” When asked about Pretti on Tuesday, Trump said, “I love everybody. I love all of our people. I love his family”.
This is a very different sentiment than the one espoused by Noem and her henchman in Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino, a senior border control agent with his own penchant for theatrics in front of the camera – often while decked out in flamboyant military attire.
By Tuesday, Bovino had been ordered out of Minneapolis and Trump sent in Tom Homan, his “border tsar” with a wide-ranging portfolio. Significantly, Homan and Noem are known to loathe each other. Homan is a career law-enforcement officer, known to be scathing of Noem’s image-first approach to policing. He has already met Minnesota governor Tim Walz and there is finally a little optimism in Minneapolis that an end to the intensive ICE deployment might be in sight.
The administration is at pains to show public support for Noem. Trump insisted on Tuesday that she would not stand down and is “doing a very good job”. It is also unlikely that this attempt at de-escalation in Minneapolis marks a significant shift in Trump’s migration policies. Arrests continue on the city’s streets even as the officials try to clear the air and a short-lived new ICE deployment took place in Maine last week. But there is more awareness of how the public is perceiving the operations, with support for ICE evaporating. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found that backing for Trump’s migration policies was at a record low, with some 58 per cent of people saying that he had gone too far.
Noem is a woman who once said that she shot her own dog. At a time when citizens are demanding more empathy from leaders, the White House might finally be realising that she is not the public face that it needs.
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Washington-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
