Trump Finally Fires Kristi Noem
Sen. Markwayne Mullin is expected to replace the disgraced DHS secretary.
CAPITOL HILL — There is a specific kind of Washington failure that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with greed dressed up as patriotism. Kristi Noem gave the country a masterclass in it.
She came to the Department of Homeland Security in January 2025 as the face of Donald Trump’s promise to make immigration enforcement a spectacle the whole country would have to watch. She delivered on that. What she could not deliver on was the simple thing every Cabinet secretary eventually needs: the ability to stay out of her own way.
It took about 14 months.
The end of Kristi Noem’s tenure at the top of a 260,000-person federal department can be traced, in no small part, to a 31-year-old woman named Tricia McLaughlin and a contracting arrangement that has the specific smell of Washington at its most rancid.
McLaughlin ran DHS’s Office of Public Affairs. She was the person who built the department’s social media channels into what one profile called “famously extreme.” She was Noem’s loudest megaphone, her most aggressive propagandist, the architect of a digital campaign designed to terrify migrants into leaving the country on their own.
She was also, it turns out, married to Ben Yoho who runs an Ohio political media firm called The Strategy Group.
And The Strategy Group, according to reporting by ProPublica and others, quietly received subcontracting work from a company called Safe America Media — a firm that was formed just days before landing a roughly $143 million DHS advertising contract, part of a total campaign that ran somewhere between $200 and $220 million.
Safe America Media. Created days before the contract. Then funneled work to the husband of the woman running the office that funded the contracts.
McLaughlin says she recused herself. DHS’s general counsel called the whole thing baseless. Maybe. But in Washington, the appearance of corruption has a way of becoming the story before the facts finish catching up. And in this case, the appearance was: a taxpayer-funded ad campaign boosting Kristi Noem’s personal profile, routed through a firm tied to her top communications aide’s husband, awarded under an “urgency” exemption that bypassed the competitive bidding that might have asked some uncomfortable questions.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who is not known for extending mercy to anyone who bores him, went after Noem in committee over the McLaughlin arrangement with the kind of surgical contempt that only a former state treasurer can muster. Kennedy doesn’t need to perform outrage. He just asks questions until the witness runs out of answers.
Noem ran out of answers.
By then, she was already carrying the sins and crimes of her agents in Minneapolis.