Donald Trump has dismissed Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. In Washington they will talk about advertising contracts, about a private jet, about internal power struggles, about Stephen Miller, about testimony in the Senate, about a 220 million dollar campaign that, according to reporting, became politically dangerous. They will talk the way they always talk - with the quiet conviction that what can be named is also what matters. But anyone who looks only upward overlooks what happened below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the capital was watching itself, something else was unfolding that cannot be easily translated into memos. In Minneapolis, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, people took to the streets. Not as a gesture, not as a ritual - but with the kind of resolve that arises when exhaustion becomes greater than fear. The protests against deportations and against deadly actions by ICE agents grew louder, broader, more persistent. In Noem\u2019s hearings, the names Alex Pretti and Renee Good came up again and again. Two people, killed. Two names that could not be explained away, because the dead possess a peculiar persistence that the living often fail to muster. A senior ICE official admitted that the events in Minneapolis had severely damaged the agency - internally as well. That is the language of an institution when it describes fear. Trump introduced Noem\u2019s successor, Senator Markwayne Mullin, with the words that he \u201creally gets along well with people.\u201d Not a word about contracts. Not a word about airplanes. Only that one sentence, which sounds like a diagnosis - about her, and about what she failed at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The major media look for causes where they know the scenery. That is understandable. People tend to describe the light that hits us and not the darkness from which it comes. But this dismissal was not a cabinet decision in the sense in which cabinet decisions usually occur. It was a reaction - to demonstrations like \u201cNo Kings,\u201d to courageous citizens, to investigative journalists who were not afraid of consequences, to lawyers who stepped in the way. The fact that Noem is the first cabinet member in Trump\u2019s second term who has to go - before Hegseth, before Bondi, before Patel - has to do with the fact that her department stood at the center of the confrontation over migration and state power. Sometimes history does not choose its figures based on merit, but on circumstance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n