How Kristi Noem became the face of Donald Trump’s police state

When Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for president back in 2015, he didn’t have what anyone could call a real campaign. Loosely advised by his old pal Roger Stone and others, there was no real structure or normal hierarchy since Trump saw himself as a managerial genius who didn’t think he needed a formal campaign apparatus. A year earlier, at an event in New Hampshire, he met a fellow backstage who had been hovering around the fringes of politics for a while. Corey Lewandowski was a lobbyist and an ex-cop, and Trump eventually hired him as campaign manager. He was just the first of several to have the job, but he’s one of the few from those early days who made it back inside the Trump orbit. But it was a long, circuitous road to get there.

According to the New York Times, Trump liked Lewandowski for his “feisty instincts and off-color humor” but he ended up reluctantly firing him after he’d manhandled a reporter. Lewandowski knocked around on the periphery for a while, but in 2019 he went on a fishing junket hosted by conservative billionaire donor Foster Friess, where he met Kristi Noem, the recently elected GOP governor of South Dakota. The pair reportedly hit it off right away, and Lewandowski was soon serving as her unpaid adviser. 

Rumors of an affair began almost immediately. This was slightly inconvenient, since both parties were married to other people and were working closely together in the governor’s office. When the gossip became public a year or so later, Noem dismissed it as “total garbage.” The governor was enmeshed in several other scandals, including allegations that she strong-armed a state official into giving her daughter an unearned certification as a real estate appraiser. Lewandowski, meanwhile, stood accused of sexually harassing a Republican donor at a Las Vegas charity event in 2021. This was just too much for the governor, who announced that he would no longer be working with her.

But there was no keeping the political soulmates apart for long. Widely considered a top prospect to be Trump’s running mate, Noem ruined her chances by proudly revealing in her 2024 memoir that she had taken her dog to a gravel pit and shot her for misbehaving. Republicans are more than fine with cruelty to humans, but apparently even they are leery of trying to elect a puppy killer. 

After being axed from Noem’s office, Lewandowski wormed his way back into Trump’s inner circle. He was hired to work on the 2024 presidential campaign, where he immediately began to interfere with the machine put together by co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. And as it turned out, he and Noem were still in touch, planning how to rescue her future.

According to a blockbuster exposé by Ben Terris at New York Magazine, Noem and Lewandowski cooked up a scheme to have Noem named as Trump’s secretary of homeland security. Lewandowski rounded up supporters such as Tom Homan, the immigration czar who is reported to have taken bribes before the election — although there’s no evidence that Lewandowski paid him for his endorsement. Trump apparently offered Noem her choice of the interior or agriculture departments, but she held out, telling him she wanted to run the department that was his top priority. He agreed.

But there was a caveat. Trump tasked Stephen Miller, whom he named as White House homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, with overseeing the administration’s immigration policy. The mass round-up and deportation of millions of immigrants, undocumented or not, is his life’s dream. Miller is the one guiding the homeland security ship, while Noem is in charge of public relations and day-to-day departmental operations. She brought Lewandowski with her to run the massive department as if it’s their own fiefdom.

While Noem is the agency’s public face, Terris reported that Lewandowski is her enforcer, reprising his role as an unpaid adviser. While he was disappointed he wasn’t named chief of staff, it’s worked out fine for him. He can maintain his outside businesses and run roughshod over the department while Noem, in Terris’ words, “brings reality-show energy” as she travels the world, dresses up in various costumes and makes propaganda videos. 

The story revealed Noem’s stunningly poor management of DHS, a vastly important agency that has poured virtually all its resources into deporting immigrants while ignoring counterterrorism efforts, FEMA and cybersecurity. The dynamic duo has clogged up the bureaucracy, requiring that all contracts over $100,000 be personally approved by Lewandowski — a step that has created massive delays in paying the bills. (The department’s electricity was reportedly nearly cut off.). People are being fired willy-nilly, even MAGA die-hards, if they get on the wrong side of Lewandowski. He routinely demands that top employees take polygraphs if he suspects they are leaking to the press. The disarray is so bad that Trump was persuaded to tell them to get their acts together.

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With her famous shiny pout and long dark tresses, Noem is the public face of Donald Trump’s emergent police state. And she is everywhere. At nearly every immigration hotspot, the secretary stages photo shoots demonstrating her hands-on leadership of the administration’s crackdown, all while sporting attire that she (mistakenly) believes fits the moment. In one surreal instance, Noem posed in front of prisoners in the notorious El Salvadoran gulag wearing a $50,000 Rolex.

DHS has spent more than $50 million filming television commercials of Noem thanking Donald Trump for securing the border, and the agency recently distributed a public service announcement of the secretary informing passengers in Transportation Security Administration lines that Democrats have shut down the government and are to blame for any delays. (Many airports are refusing to air it.) The low-rent Leni Riefenstahl social media propaganda campaign, in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and street theater are meticulously documented, has the effect of inuring the public to the idea that troops are invading American cities and no one who opposes the regime is safe. 

But Noem has a lot of money to play with. The One Big Beautiful Bill handed over a massive $170 billion war chest to the department, which is engaged in building detention camps all over the country — by private companies, who are making a killing, naturally — and is offering up to $50,000 signing bonuses to any dude willing to put on a mask and start cracking heads. 

Terris writes:

Under Noem, it is DHS, not the Justice Department, that has emerged as Trump’s most devastating and visible weapon against the right’s perceived enemies. “She’s going to play a key role in advancing Donald Trump’s effort to consolidate the powers of the presidency,” a former DHS official told me. “I think by the end of this administration, if she stays the whole time, she’s likely to become the warden of the police state.”

But in the meantime, Noem and Lewandowski are working night and day together, preparing for the next step in her political career. She’s clearly swinging for the fences, and is almost certainly planning a run for president in 2028.

When Noem was confronted about the reprehensible story of her shooting her dog, she responded that she told the story to illustrate her willingness to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly.” In that regard, Noem is certainly proving her capability, and she is evidently counting on the fact that her image as the cold, remorseless executor of the plan to rid America of foreigners will launch her into the White House. They don’t call her ICE Barbie for nothing.