Throwing Tantrums over a Blanket and a Badge

If you love Trump Administration mess like I do, the Wall Street Journal published a gift of a must-read scoop last night, exposing Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem and her chief adviser slash reportedly-not-so-secret lover, Corey Lewandowski, as two of the best examples of the “everyone is 12” theory of modern politics. What makes it especially juicy is to my editor’s eye, it sure looks like the sources for this report are their rivals within DHS, and this is ultimately a tale of factional warfare within Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation that is now spilling out into the public. The circular MAGA firing squad is forming in front of our very eyes these days, accelerated by Trump’s plummeting approval rating making all the rats on this sinking ship realize that one day, they will be left to fend for themselves like all the Trump stooges who came before them (call it the Giuliani rule). 

This battle spilling out of DHS so far is being fought with the weaponry of gossip, and boy it’s good gossip. There is a hilarious tale about Kristi Noem and her blankie that is notable enough that WSJ referenced it in the title of what is mostly a serious story about the “chaos” inside DHS in the wake of their assault on Minnesota. To make this next paragraph really hit hard, I recommend playing the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music over the last sentence. 

“In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn’t moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident,” reports WSJ. “The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.”

These are not serious people. This has been manifestly obvious about every person in Trump’s orbit for some time now, but even by Trump standards, Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are deeply shambolic collections of cells. “The blanket incident,” as the front page for earth’s most serious financial people refers to, is not even the most embarrassing part of this report. Lewandowski, a former adviser to Trump who still is considered the president’s friend, exposed himself to DHS last year as an actual 12-year-old boy next to his fascist Barbie mistress cuddling her blankie.

“In an incident last year that rankled some senior staff at the agency, Lewandowski made it known to top ICE officials that he wanted to be issued a law-enforcement badge and a federally issued gun, according to people familiar with his push,” wrote WSJ. “Officials are typically only issued a badge and a gun after undergoing law-enforcement training.”

Dear reader, if you’re wondering if one of Trump’s good friends is both lazy enough to not go through law-enforcement training and petty enough to fire career officials because they did not hand him an unearned badge and a gun, all based on the authority of him schtupping the person in charge, of course he is. Per WSJ, not only did the administration plan to hire, then pass over Tom Feeley for the top job at ICE after Feeley resisted Lewandowski’s edict, but top ICE lawyer Ken Padilla “was placed on administrative leave” and then demoted to FEMA after declining to sign off on this 12-year-old boy’s demand that he be handed a badge and a gun so he can finally feel like a man for once in his miserable life.

The kicker to this deeply sourced report is that in our age of bad guys winning, Lewandowski kept that trend alive, and has been seen wearing a badge “emblazoned with the words ‘Homeland Security’” on it, though it’s not clear whether he has succeeded in getting a gun (WSJ said those efforts “stalled” last year after they and other reporters asked about it). It’s clear as day that Corey Lewandowski went on a warpath through DHS over a fucking gun and a badge and ruined people’s careers over it, and I’m sure those folks didn’t talk to other folks who talked to the WSJ (Padilla declined to comment to them).

This gets to how I think you can tell this is factional leak warfare, where the bulk of my case lies higher up in the meat of the report about the “constant chaos inside DHS,” and not the dessert story WSJ gives you at the end about blankies and badges. After masked government agents murdered Alex Pretti in cold blood, Noem and Lewandowski reportedly “berated Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director” over the stream of videos emerging from Minnesota of protesters and masked fascists tangling in the streets of Minneapolis. I think the sources show their hands in the next paragraph as to what players in this saga they may be orbiting around (emphasis mine).

“The president hated the continued stream of videos, [Noem and Lewandowski] told Lyons, whom they pinned the blame on,” reports WSJ. “They demanded that he draw up a new plan for ICE to carry out targeted enforcement—an approach Lyons had been advocating all along—according to ICE officials, but that the pair had previously eschewed.”

The WSJ story is basically that Lewandowski and Noem threw Lyons under the bus over consequences that sprang from their tinpot 12-year-old co-dictatorship which Lyons and company warned them about, and now they want Lyons to do what he has reportedly been yelling at them to do this whole time. Trump bringing in sketchy sack of $50,000 enthusiast Tom Homan to put a different face on the same kind of fascism being imposed on Minnesota makes it obvious that there are diverging factions inside DHS, and I think you can probably draw it roughly along Homan/Lyons versus Noem/Lewandowski/Greg Bovino lines (WSJ spends some of the report detailing Noem’s psychotic jealousy of Homan’s TV time). There is one side of Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign who wants to do the fascism quieter and in night raids, and the other side who wants to do the fascism on camera in order to create content for the MechaHitler CSAM site because that is all the MAGA pea brains understand about the world now, and also so Noem can build a platform to help her run for president in 2028.

Perhaps the funniest part of this terrific report by WSJ is that DHS did not exactly deny that Noem and Lewandowski are sleeping together (they are both married to other people). After noting that Trump often brings up this reported not-so-secret, WSJ wrote that Noem and Lewandowski “do little to hide their relationship inside the department,” and when asked for comment on it, all the DHS spokeswoman said was that the department “doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip.”

In so many ways, this is the perfect Trump 2.0 story. The headline is true horror, a genuine ethnic cleansing campaign driven by an entity who just received tens of billions of dollars from Republicans to build concentration camps in America that their secret police will kidnap and put people in—but it is being run by the most unfathomably incompetent shitshows alive. Lewandowski and Noem are directing and filming all these crimes against humanity, then berating underlings when it inevitably backfires on them, all while they apparently dry hump each other in full view of everyone at DHS. The picture painted of this whole ordeal by WSJ is…a lot.

Noem and Lewandowski are the ideal Trump swamp creatures. Pure uncut ego. Zero self-awareness and even less empathy for any human other than themselves. Utter brainless dolts driven by pure id who don’t understand that other people have agency too. Totally blind to the fact that if you throw your weight around to the point that it even irritates a lot of your coworkers who also like fascism, they will eventually go blab to the WSJ about all your embarrassing and horny 12-year-old nonsense that’s amounted to making DHS the most hated government entity among the American people.  

Whenever we do get past this era of collapse and regain the hope to build a society instead of tearing one down or settling for preserving the scraps of an unjust one, we must hold scum like Lewandowski and Noem legally accountable for their grave crimes against humanity. We cannot sugarcoat the immense damage they have done to so many people’s lives just because they fit so seamlessly into the South Park universe of constitutionally inept adults who know less than nothing while lecturing everyone about everything. I focused on the gossip because honestly, I need a break from the horrors, but there is so much more meat to this story I didn’t cover that you should read, and WSJ very obviously has the goods here. DHS is making all of its critics’ worst fears come true, led by two of the most broken cretins this country has ever produced, so much so that even their fellow fascists clearly can’t stand them anymore and are probably trying to get them fired.