This story alone would get anybody else in government canned on the spot, but again, we live in the Through The Looking Glass world of Trump, and the characters that he finds to attend him at his very own mad tea party. That said, even the Red Queen would decry, “Off with her head,” from time to time and the facts are starting to stack up against Kristi Noem. Orange Man may go into Red Queen mode sooner rather than later if it will keep Noem from making him look bad. Remember, Trump thinks about himself and his image morning, noon, and night. And he may decide to throw Noem under the bus because he has a “moral” reason for doing so and watching Trump wax moral should be a real hoot. (Maybe he’ll have J.D. do the firing?)
Noem, who is married, and her bumbling chief adviser have repeatedly denied their alleged relationship, which has been referred to as D.C.’s “worst-kept secret.” Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, is also known as Noem’s “gatekeeper,” serving as a special government employee who travels with her, weighs in on personnel matters, and shapes enforcement.
During their tenure, they’ve faced mounting scrutiny for mismanaging funds. In November, it was reported that the pair ordered 10 Spirit Airlines jets before realizing the planes had no engines.
DHS officials, who warned Noem the purchase was impractical and that hiring additional flight contractors would be far cheaper, dug deeper and found that Spirit —which has filed for bankruptcy twice—didn’t own the planes in the first place and that the engines would have to be purchased separately, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Lewandowski has also spearheaded efforts to replace ICE leadership nationwide with Border Patrol veterans to impose a more heavy-handed, military-style approach to Trump’s immigration crackdown, including the hostile operation dubbed “Midway Blitz” in Chicago.
Because Lewandowski is an unpaid special government employee, he is legally allowed to work only 130 days per year. In August, Axios reported the White House was quietly investigating his gross undercounting of his days.
You can see from this brief sketch and from everything you’ve heard about ICE in general that it is being woefully and egregiously mismanaged. The issue is, does Trump want to continue to put up with the negative publicity? Or, does he want to throw a few miscreants under the bus and in doing so seem like he’s on top of it and looking to make ICE great again?
Your guess is as good as mine. Trump has no love lost for his old campaign manager. Lewandowski got fired from the Trump campaign in June of 2016 due to internal conflicts and plenty of negative press. But that was in the fledgling stages of Trump world, when the then-candidate wanted to seem as legitimate as possible and so he worried more about signs of incompetence. From that stage Trump went on to love incompetence because it owned the libs.
ICE and its nonstop drama definitely is owning the libs and it’s alienating a lot of voters and people who might now go out to vote, having had terrible experiences with ICE. That’s the main reason ICE keeps its worse excesses in blue states, for both the theatricality of their misbehavior and because they figure they’re mitigating their damages.
Maybe not. ICE is very unpopular and the theory that makes sense to me is that Trump will decide to revamp ICE next year, bringing us the new, improved ICE, just like it was a 1950’s cereal commercial, and that’s when you might see Glenn Youngkin installed as the director and Lewandowski and Noem being shown the door.
Plus, Noem overtly whoring around like she is may not appeal to Trump. He doesn’t like women and it wouldn’t surprise me if he even *punished* Noem for having an affair with Lewandowski (granting for the sake of argument all the rumors are true) and fire her on that basis. Trump is nothing if not a double standards kind of a guy.
And MAGA could love him for this, especially the faux Xians. They would love their cult leader routing the harlot and her lover and having a former Republican governor come in and give some dignity to ICE.
That’s the theory I’m following for the moment. That’s the one that makes sense to me. And don’t expect Trump to drop the guillotine, he’ll leave that to Vance. Or somebody.
planes w/no engines, cabinet w/no brains, pResident with no mandate as the election was stolen by disenfranchising huge number of Kamala’s voters, tRump with no brains… What a great country or what!
pardon me while I dumb myself down by turning on cbs…
the problem is that trump and his cult still want to deport millions and cleaning up ice won’t get that. if qualified applicants aren’t applying then i don’t know what they expect youngkin to do. but the plane thi g is funny.