Kristi Noem is now famous (or infamous) for posing with her $60,000 Rolex watch in front of El Salvador’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Center, with tattooed Venezuelan inmates peering out from behind bars. She has also posed in ICE uniforms and as the upscale yet steely-eyed ICE commander in front of the White House.
One wag has renamed her “Gestapo Barbie,” but that’s not really a fair comparison: ICE is not the Gestapo. (At least not yet.)
Still, there are more than a few hints that Trump wants his own police, a Gestapo-like force loyal only to him, and not the Constitution. According to the ACLU, there is substantial evidence from 2025 that Donald Trump and his administration are actively pursuing policies to repurpose ICE, the military, and other federal enforcement agencies as policing forces that would be loyal to the president over constitutional constraints. Trump and his advisors have repeatedly downplayed or undermined explicit constitutional safeguards in the context of mass deportation, protest suppression, and the expansion of executive authority. Pro Publica claims that Trump is intent on building a shadowy, unconstitutional police force.
As to ICE, Noem is Trump’s appointed, anointed corrupt agent, willing to do whatever he asks.
Why corrupt?
Ms. Noem seems to be openly engaged in corruption. In prior administrations, this would be a front-page scandal, but in Trump 2.0 it seems more or less ordinary. She used taxpayer money for her own vanity: The New York Times reported:
The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two Gulfstream private jets for Kristi Noem, the secretary, and other top department officials at a cost of $172 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. The jets, which a department official said were needed for safety, are the latest expenditures on behalf of Ms. Noem to draw scrutiny from Democrats and other critics who have noted her lavish spending on living and other expenses during her time in public life.
On November 14, Pro Publica ran an article noting how she funneled $220 million to a “consulting firm” with long standing personal and business ties to her and her senior aides at DHS.
And the CEO of this company? The husband of Tricia McLaughlin, Noem’s right-hand-PR person. The company also played a huge role in her 2022 gubernatorial campaign for South Dakota and has extensive ties to Corey Lewandowski, former campaign director for Trump and long rumored to be romantically and/or sexually involved with Noem. From the Economic Times: “For years, rumors of a possible affair have followed the two, and now several officials in the Trump administration say it’s ‘widely understood” that they are more than just coworkers, even though both deny it.
Even more concerning, though, is what Senator Chris Murphy brought to the public’s attention in speaking to Secretary Noem at a recent Senate hearing: her department is “out of control” and is not following the law. Here is part of what Senator Murphy said:
“Your department is out of control. You are spending like you don’t have a budget. You’re on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year.”
“You are illegally refusing to spend funds that have been authorized by this Congress and approved by this committee.”
“You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation, implementing a brand-new immigration system that you have invented that has little relation to the statutes that you are commanded to follow.”
“This obsession with spending at the border has left the country unprotected elsewhere: the security threats to the United States are higher, not lower, than when before Trump came to office. To fund the border, you have illegally gutted spending for cyber security, and as we speak, Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day attacking our nation. You’ve withdrawn funds for disaster prevention –– storms are going to kill more people in this country because of your illegal withholding of these funds.”
I could be wrong here, but it is highly unlikely that there will be any accountability for any of this in the legal/political system that we now have. Why not? Because Donald J. Trump is running the government, most of the Inspectors General have been fired (18 since the second Inauguration) and the federal courts are log-jammed with a multitude of cases challenging other illegal acts of this “administration.” Most importantly, the Department of Justice under Pam Bondi is clearly not going to prosecute any actions not approved by Donald Trump. As Mother Jones has written (and most legal observers emphatically agree), the DOJ is now Trump’s personal law firm.
Finally, as long as the GOP controls the Senate House of Representatives, there will be no effective oversight of DHS, despite Senator Murphy’s compelling verbal indictment of Ms. Noem’s conduct in the hearing recently held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC). Even if the committee made a referral to the DOJ, Pam Bondi would let it lie dormant.
Noem also accurately captures the zeitgeist of today’s GOP: command, control, punish “others” rather than reflect on your own attitudes and actions. It’s all a part of an increasingly obvious attitude that “empathy is weakness” (to paraphrase Elon Musk), and that a certain amount of cruelty toward “others” is necessary to Make America Great Again. It’s also of a piece with the growing “nazi-fication” of the far right in the GOP, seen recently in the embrace by Tucker Carlson of Nick Fuentes, who is an open admirer of Adolph Hitler. (In Fuentes’ own words in that interview, Hitler was a pedophile, but “really fucking cool.” )
Trump has now criticized those who have criticized Carlson for his “softball interview” of Fuentes, but there is a growing rift in the GOP between those who believe the party needs all voices and ideas, no matter how repugnant, who oppose “liberalism” in any of its forms.
Oh, how important it is to look really “tough” in today’s GOP! They can “own” the “bleeding heart liberals,” some of whom embrace the notion that the U.S. is a “nation of immigrants,” and they can “own” the lefty, rule of law pantywaists who wring their hands over killing alleged drug-runners using boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. No due process! You can almost hear Noem and Trump “thinking” to themselves: “Oh, shut up, you weak-kneed, lily-livered liberals!”
And, since they now “own” the federal government, they can do what they like, no matter what laws have meant in past times. So, “legal” but so wrong.
Perhaps the best summary of where the GOP has gone missing in action morally is in the “groyperficiation” of the GOP and the disaffected “groypers” lead by Fuentes and Carlson who seek an America that is white, Christian, racistly anti-immigrant, anti-semitic, and isolationist. Ezra Klein was interviewing John Ganz recently on this topic, and Ganz observed that the groypers ––who came together online after Trump’s ascendance in 2016 –– had lots of jokes about slavery, gas chambers, and the Holocaust, and summed it up by noting: “It’s just an anarchic indulgence of a sadistic id that usually involves the humiliation of minorities or women.” PLBW noted last month that cruelty may be the new cachet for a lot of young Republicans.
Maybe Ms. Noem has to keep doing cosplays of “toughness” to stay in the fold?