Peter and the apostles (2017), exposure of massive, Roza basalt columns near Upper Goose Lake north of Othello, WA
Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and the path to perdition
By way of introduction, Kristi Noem is the former Governor of South Dakota (2019 thru 2024). Her second autobiography, No Going Back (2024) was part of a months-long audition last year to promote her aspiration to be Donald Trump’s pick for vice president. The book was supposed to underscore her toughness while solidifying her alignment with the brash and unrepentant culture of Trumpism.
Advance copies of the book provided to the media made news for a couple reasons. The first was her disclosure that she’d shot and killed a young (14 month-old) hunting dog, “Cricket,” on account of the dog’s misbehavior. She also wrote that she then turned the gun on a goat she’d been having problems with. It took two shots to kill the goat. From her standpoint, the moral of the story is that leadership requires action to solve problems before they fester. Still, the disclosure rankled a large cohort of American dog owners including some familiar with the breed (German wire-haired pointer) in South Dakota. The story quickly became fodder for Saturday Night Live and other late-night comedians
Despite the governor’s eye-brow-raising physical makeover and her frequent trips to Trump’s retreat at Mar-a-Lago, the blowback and jokes about her may have given Donald Trump pause. He chose JD Vance to be his vice president. Noem’s consolation prize was a cabinet position. A week after winning the 2024 election, Trump announced she would lead the Department of Homeland Security.
More on that shortly.
Though the story of Cricket’s death by gunshot spread like a high plains brushfire, Noem also drew attention for what was removed from No Going Back after advance copies were distributed to reviewers. A passage in the advance edition described a tense face-to-face encounter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un when Noem was serving (prior to being governor) as South Dakota’s lone delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Here’s part of what she wrote: “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation, and determination.”
As the New York Times and other news outlets soon discovered, there is no evidence that any such meeting took place. Noem had simply made it up.
While she’d offered her take on what’s required to deal with foreign leaders, she’s never addressed the deeper question of what kind of children’s pastor gives herself permission to compose such a grandiose lie. One revealing exchange came on NBC’s Meet the Press when Noem tried to flip the script as NBC’s Peter Alexander pressed her about the lie. She repeatedly insisted the subject was out of bounds and used her truculence to try to put the inquiring journalist in his place—as if her fabricating a meeting with a notoriously ruthless dictator was a sensitive medical issue that deserves privacy. You can view that part the interview here.
Kristi Noem, (left) as a South Dakota Congressional Representative in 2013, and during the filming of her chilling video from El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison last month. (2013 photo courtesy of Wikimedia images.)
What sets Kristi Noem apart from her predecessors is her conspicuous visibility—often in tactical gear and sometimes sporting assault rifles—as she accompanies ICE agents storming work places and other spaces searching for illegal immigrants.
The context, of course, is that the Trump 2.0 presidency (amid the usual chaos) bristles with intimidation and domination. In that regard Trumpism borrows from the script journalist Naomi Klein warned about in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, in which Klein exposed capitalist exploitation of foreign societies following natural disasters and other upheavals.
In this era, the shock is self-inflicted on the “homeland,” driven by Trump’s autocratic desires. One minute it’s the red-light, green-light game of his market scrambling global tariff war, the next a DOGE storm trooper takeover of a critical federal agency, the next a new executive order assigning federal law enforcement officials to drill into the lives of critics whom Trump castigates as traitors.
Noem’s well-photographed appearance inside a notoriously brutal and deadly prison in El Salvador—where dozens of tightly-herded and ghostly prisoners formed a backdrop for her dire warnings—freezes a moment in this nightmarish time. Her transformation from a rural children’s pastor to a cold-blooded, Rolex-wearing badass is complete. It is hard to believe that the person she has become is a person empowered to speak for us. It is stage-managed and performative, delivering a promise of remorseless cruelty. With Trump’s blessing her voice is a new voice of America to the world.
Demonstrators from Spokane’s Peace & Justice Action League protesting U.S. involvement in torture in May of 2016
The long shadow of Trump v. USA
None of this would have happened without the Supreme Court, and the decades-long campaign to stack the federal courts with judges who favor what the Federalist Society—a nursery of conservative judges and corporate friendly initiatives—terms the “unitary executive” theory. It is a bland term for the consolidation of power in the presidency. The practical result is that protocols that once-secured the non-partisan independence of key agencies—most importantly the Department of Justice—are being quickly erased, with devastating results.
The apex of the transformation was the Roberts’ Courts jaw-dropping ruling last summer in Trump v. USA, a 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice Roberts himself, handing Trump a broad shield of “presumptive”criminal immunity for “official acts” in his tenure as president. (The verdict was so twisted in Trump’s favor that the court’s ruling even bars prosecutors from presenting evidence about a president’s official conduct in order to provide jurors a broader context of criminal intent by a president acting in his/her unofficial capacity.)
To say Trump v. USA has added swagger to Trump’s vow to deliver “retribution” to those who’ve opposed, investigated or prosecuted him puts it far too mildly.
The additional power the Supreme Court delivered to the presidency has only propelled Trump’s ambition to be above the law. He is unrestrained, now, as he openly issues orders to deploy the investigative and enforcement powers of the Justice Department and FBI to intimidate his political opponents. It has been transformative to the point that, as I write, Noem (no doubt with Trump’s blessing) all but dares federal district court judge Paula Xinis to impose sanctions for DHS’s defiance of a unanimous Supreme Court ruling. The ruling Judge Xinis referenced was issued Thursday (4/10), ordering the government to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom the government admits was arrested and delivered to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT (“Terrorism Confinement Center”) prison by mistake.
“The only way out, is in a coffin.”
—CBS 60 Minutes, quoting a former Salvadoran justice minister about the fate of prisoners at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT)
A clear signal from the Trump White House, Justice Department and Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security operation is one of undisguised contempt for the judiciary. In mid-March, federal district court judge James Boasberg sought answers from government lawyers regarding the circumstances and status of the plan to airlift over 200 detainees to El Salvador. Judge Boasberg met a brick wall, and then a special brick thrown at his head by the president. Trump derided the well-regarded judge as “Crooked,” a “Radical left lunatic of a Judge” and a “troublemaker” who “should be impeached.”
Trump’s attack brought a swift rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts but to no discernible effect.
Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, asserted herself last week by punishing veteran Justice Department lawyer, Erez Reuveni. Reuveni was representing the U.S. in the case of a Maryland man—Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who was loaded onto one of the planes headed for CECOT despite a court order barring his deportation to El Salvador. When questioned by Judge Paula Xinis, Reuvani admitted ICE made a mistake in flying Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. Under continued questioning by Judge Xinis, Reuvani also said he’d not been informed by ICE or Homeland Security as to why Abrego Garcia was put on the plane. The legal profession’s standards of conduct require attorneys to be truthful and candid before the judiciary and, in times when the rule of law is not under assault by the president, kudos would flow to Erez Reuveni for complying with his ethical duties.
Instead, Bondi suspended him for failing to “zealously advocate” on behalf of the government. She also suspended his supervisor for “failure to supervise a subordinate.”
The heat of the conflicts should not obscure what the argument is ultimately about. By law (reaffirmed in the Supreme Court’s expedited ruling on Thursday) each detainee had a right to contest whatever evidence the government claimed to possess that would justify transporting him to another country to face inhumane confinement, perhaps for the rest of his life. It’s not just any law, it’s actually a fundamental human right whose violation by a monarch was at the very core of grievances expressed in the nation’s Declaration of Independence. That a president would call for the impeachment of a judge trying to uphold a bedrock principal of human rights tells you in a nutshell just how off the rails the Trump regime is.
It’s only shocking because it should be
A week ago, CBS’s 60 Minutes aired its most recent reporting on the conditions at the CECOT, located not far from the nation’s capital, San Salvador. The gist of the reporting, this time, focused what was known about the detainees ICE had delivered under a contract with the El Salvadoran government. The reporter, Cecilia Vega, reminded viewers that when the network interviewed acting ICE director Tom Homan last year he said the Trump plan was to focus, first, on rounding up and removing “the worst of the worst.”
But were the detainees flown to CECOT really the worst? The research 60 Minutes conducted into the backgrounds of the detainees found:
•at least 22 percent of the men did have criminal records in the United States or abroad
•the vast majority of crimes were for nonviolent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing. About a dozen were accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping
•the reporters could not find criminal records for 75 percent of the Venezuelans in custody at CECOT, 179 of the men now sitting in the prison
The remainder of the reporting is in the video below. The camera captures something words simply can’t describe. Part of it is the unsettling image of a wealthy American woman, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, speaking in a steely voice about what can happen to people who come to the U.S. illegally. Behind her are the silent stares of dozens of men who don’t get to sleep on mattresses and who may never see their families again. Perhaps Kim Jong Un is impressed.
Today’s post is free to all readers but please consider supporting this project with a paid, annual subscription to The Daily Rhubarb at the link above…
p.s. I need to amend last Sunday’s “The screen door slams” piece. I reported, perhaps too breezily, that there were 2,000 or so protestors, including my sister, along Division Street. It was a loose and conservative guess, given that I couldn’t see the end of the line of signs looking northward from where I was standing. A loyal reader (thank you) corrected me by reporting that—by his careful accounting there were more than 6,000 at the event and that the Spokesman-Review, Spokane’s daily newspaper, estimated the number at about 5,000.
—tjc
Great read! So frustrating and I'm just astounded by this cruelty to these human beings. They need to throw Noem in that cell behind her.