How Kristi Noem finally lost Trump — and her job

By Michael Williams, Priscilla Alvarez, Lauren Fox, Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — After a year of controversies, Kristi Noem’s fate was sealed over just a few days. It started with a heads-up from the Hill.

Sen. John Kennedy let the White House know Sunday that he was not going to go easy on the Homeland Security secretary when she appeared before the Judiciary Committee. The Louisiana Republican planned to pepper Noem with tough questions about her agency’s lavish spending on an advertising campaign that prominently showcased her.

Before cameras and a packed audience Tuesday, Kennedy eased into his line of questioning. Properly vetting people at the southern border isn’t racist, right? Both Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are needed to do that, are they not? Noem responded in the affirmative. “OK,” Kennedy said. “I just wanted to get my congratulations on the record.”

He then delivered on his plan, unleashing a series of questions about the $220 million ad campaign and how that squared with Noem’s stated promise to root out waste from her agency.

He had to ask more than once whether Trump approved that spending spree before Noem provided a direct answer: “Mmhmm, yes.”

A fateful answer

That response, it turned out, was the embattled Cabinet secretary’s final straw. Kennedy got a call from Trump later that evening. The president, Kennedy told CNN, “was pissed.”

“Her version and the president’s version of whether the president, A) was informed and B) consented are decidedly different,” Kennedy said. (Trump told NBC News Thursday that he hadn’t known about the advertising campaign. “I wasn’t thrilled with it,” he said.)

It was in that same conversation with Kennedy that Trump floated an idea for a replacement: What did he think about his colleague in the Senate, Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin?

“I told him I’m very fond of Markwayne,” Kennedy recalled of their conversation. Even if he didn’t like Mullin, a former mixed-martial arts fighter, he added: “I wouldn’t say otherwise because he’d whoop my ass.”

By Thursday, Trump had ruminated with other allies on Capitol Hill about replacing Noem, finally selecting Mullin for the job and announcing it in a midday social media post before the senator could even talk to his wife about the opportunity.

Minutes after Trump posted the news — including a new title for Noem as “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas” — she was scheduled to step on a stage in Nashville to deliver preplanned remarks to a friendly audience of police officers at the Sergeant Benevolent Association Major Cities Conference.

Noem learned of her firing as she was arriving at the Nashville event, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.  Two of the sources said Trump called Noem directly to inform her of his decision.

Noem remained in the car for several minutes upon arrival at the conference, multiple local law enforcement officials present at the conference told CNN. She then got out of the car and went into the reception room where she met staffers who were present. While Noem was backstage waiting to give her speech, the news alert that she had been fired began to cross on staffers’ phones.

Throughout her speech, Noem made no mention of her departure from the agency. In fact, some of her remarks indicated she had a forward-looking role at the department — though she did make some vague allusions to a new role Trump had selected her for focusing on drug trafficking.

Noem sent a memo to employees Thursday afternoon, describing her role as the “honor of my life.”

‘Kristi’s drama’

In the end, it wasn’t the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis alone that cost Noem her job. Nor was it her immediate reaction to prematurely paint both the mom-of-three and the veterans’ nurse as wannabe terrorists and aspiring cop killers. It wasn’t the sexual relationship she allegedly had with her unpaid subordinate, Corey Lewandowski (both are married and have denied the relationship), the exorbitant spending on executive jets, or the public messaging from her agency which was riddled with White nationalist dog whistles and error-prone descriptions of immigrants.

But each of those controversies accumulated — and then Noem dragged Trump’s name into it.

After Tuesday, a White House official told CNN, it became clear that “it was time” for Noem to go.

“Replacing Kristi was based on the culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” the official said.

They added: “Kristi’s drama sadly overshadowed and distracted from the Administration’s extremely popular immigration agenda, which will continue full force.”

Lewandowski, who has long frustrated some top White House aides, is expected to depart with Noem.

In her post, Noem was charged with executing the president’s signature campaign pledge: carrying out mass deportations. And her approach was flashy from the outset. She was photographed on ride alongs with ICE on immigration enforcement operations, filmed riding horseback at Mt. Rushmore for ads, and posing in front of a cell of detainees at El Salvador’s mega prison after the US sent hundreds of Venezuelans there.

Trump often publicly praised her. But internally, her agency still faced tremendous pressure from the White House to deliver. Federal immigration authorities fell short of White House-imposed daily quotas of 3,000 arrests, even as the administration cast a wide net over who could be subject to arrest, including controversial sweeps in Democratic-led cities led by top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino.

The aggressive — and at times, haphazard — approach fueled tensions within the department, according to officials. The first public rebuke appeared to come with White House border czar Tom Homan’s deployment to Minnesota to resolve issues associated with the massive surge of federal agents for immigration enforcement.

But issues within the department extended beyond her handling of immigration. She also tightened her grip on her department’s purse strings, ordering that every contract and grant over $100,000 must cross her desk for approval — a move that Noem has frequently defended as intended to cut down on waste.

Noem’s cost controls led to a delay in monetary relief for areas decimated by natural disasters last summer — delays that echoed similar controversies during her tenure as South Dakota’s governor.

Over the past year, Noem drove an aggressive overhaul of FEMA, the disaster relief agency within DHS she had vowed to dismantle, calling it bloated, partisan and ineffective.

During her tenure, FEMA lost many of its most experienced leaders and about a third of its permanent workforce, according to current and former officials. Noem and her team cut contracts, grants, training and travel — moves that, officials say, raised fears the agency would struggle to handle another major catastrophe.

‘Long overdue’

Multiple Homeland Security officials expressed relief over Noem’s ouster. While many were stunned by the president’s announcement, some saw it as inevitable.

“I think it’s long overdue. She wasn’t qualified for the position from the beginning,” a Homeland Security official told CNN.

Another Homeland Security official said Noem “paid the price” after what they alleged was her exploiting the role for personal gain.

The most anticipated change following her departure, officials said, is a steady hand at the helm of the department that had been wracked with firings and frequent reprimanding from Lewandowski.

Officials anticipate that immigration policies and priorities are largely expected to remain the same at the department. One Trump administration official told CNN her departure will likely serve as a reset for Homan, who was deployed to Minneapolis in response to Good and Pretti’s killing and whose approach to immigration enforcement is more targeted. Homan and Noem have rarely spoken to each other in recent months, US officials told CNN.

“This signals the very welcome end of a totally needless, damaging petty ego civil war within DHS and a full reset for Tom Homan and an adult DHS secretary to build a unified team that will get President Trump’s missions accomplished faster and better,” a Trump administration official told CNN.

Inside FEMA, many employees — from high-ranking officials to rank-and-file staff — celebrated news of Noem’s departure. Multiple staffers inside headquarters described audible cheers across the office when the news broke.

“The mood across headquarters is relief,” one high-ranking FEMA official told CNN. “We haven’t seen the morale this high in a while.”

Her team imposed a culture of fear among FEMA staffers, officials said, polygraphing some in a hunt for leakers and abruptly removing others from their positions without explanation.

“She oversaw the complete destruction of the agency, forced the resignation of some of the brightest minds and most experienced people in emergency management, ignored every one of the hard learned lessons from Katrina and put us in a place where we are no longer well prepared to help people before, during or after disasters,” another high-ranking FEMA official said. “It will take decades to fix the damage she has caused.”

Trump picks a fighter

In Mullin, Trump has selected a reliable champion of his immigration agenda whom the White House says should be confirmed “as quickly as possible.” The Oklahoma senator will inherit an agency that is expected to define both Trump’s legacy and his own.

Shortly after Trump announced his intention to have Mullin serve as Homeland Security secretary, Mullin said his focus would be to “keep the homeland secure.”

“There’s a lot of work we can do to get the Department of Homeland Security working for the American people,” Mullin said.

Mullin has suggested that children born in the US to undocumented immigrants should be deported with their parents so as not to be separated. He has said that people should be expected to carry their papers in case they are stopped by immigration officers. He defended immigration officers’ actions in the incidents that led to the deaths of both Good and Pretti.

But his and Trump’s alignment on one specific issue – the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, has been more tenuous. During the attack, Mullin, who was serving in the House at the time, helped to barricade the doors to the House floor and later said he threatened to physically engage any rioters who broke through.

As Trump was mulling the possibility of pardoning those rioters after his election, Mullin urged him on CNN to “look at the facts before he does something,” and after Trump did pardon them, the Oklahoma senator said there was “no question” the siege of the Capitol was a “riot” and a “horrible day.”

“However,” he said, by electing Trump, Americans have chosen to “move on.”

It’s unclear how Noem will move on. But some Republicans in the Senate are relishing the chance to turn over a new leaf.

After Mullin’s new position was announced, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, an animal lover who during this week’s hearing sparred with Noem over admissions in her 2024 memoir that she shot her misbehaving puppy, shared a picture of Mullin’s family to social media, saying the senator “is a great guy and a great choice to lead DHS.”

“Another big positive: he likes dogs,” Tillis wrote.

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CNN’s Kristen Holmes and John Miller contributed.