Donald Trump Is the Worst DHS Secretary in History

A lot has happened. Here are some of the things. This is the TPM Morning Memo.

Kristi Noem was just a cipher

I found myself ranging from indifferent to slightly disconcerted by the reaction to President Trump’s firing of Kristi Noem as DHS secretary.

In the old days of a less homogeneous Republican Party, a change in cabinet secretary could mark a shift into or out of one alliance or another. This could highlight a point of internal tension in the party due to regional, cultural or ideological differences. This could bring one coalition into power and another out. This may represent a change in policy or an adjustment in tone.

Even back then it probably didn’t matter that a lot, but if you were in the nuance, there were things to resolve. Today, with the Republican Party in lockstep with a Trump White House that micromanages every department and agency, the identity of which particular reality TV member (literally in the case of Sean Duffy at the Department of Transportation) occupies which cabinet position no longer has much meaning.

Noème came out. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin is in attendance. But there are an endless supply of other figureheads that Trump can appoint to nominally run DHS, while he and Stephen Miller, through Tom Homan, pull the strings in the West Wing. The mass deportation operation, for which no one is more responsible than Donald Trump, continues mercilessly and lawlessly.

Is Noem the worst DHS secretary in history? As with Pam Bondi’s historically poor run as attorney general, this seems like an inappropriate point. They are codes, intended to fulfill a televised role assigned by Trump and respond to his every whim and impulse, not to run giant organizations or make independent decisions. Donald Trump is the worst DHS secretary in history, and the worst attorney general and… you get the point.

There is a tendency in media coverage to reward Trump by covering the action – a firing – rather than her failure at all levels. This results in a strange herd dynamic in which everyone crowds in to reject the obviously stupid person who was fired and thus teams up with the powerful actor who did the shooting. Which is, well, insane here and in the many other cases of Trump’s serial firings of officials who are doing exactly what he said in the way he ordered them to be done for the reasons he explained.

In a way, I shouldn’t be surprised. This is a guy whose entire political persona is rooted in performative firings on a reality TV show. This phrase resonates with many Americans, although I wish it were different.

The mass deportation operation has been Trump’s singular political obsession throughout his national political career. This would have happened with or without Kristi Noem. This will continue until Trump and Trump alone decide otherwise.

Kafkaesque brutality

A Colombian journalist working in the United States while seeking political asylum here was arrested in Nashville this week and quickly shipped to Louisiana for allegedly missing two meetings with ICE, one of which was canceled by January’s ice storm and another that she says ICE told her she did not have to attend.

“Christian nations under God”

Speaking to representatives of Western Hemisphere countries yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew his white nationalist flag:

.@SECWAR “All the nations represented in this room are descendants of Western civilization.

Our nations are and always will be united by our heritage, our history and our geography in this New World. We share the same interests and, as a result, we face an essential test.

If… pic.twitter.com/dO0ivfYQ5g

– DOW Quick Response (@DOWResponse) March 5, 2026

The latest news from the Middle East…

Before we dive into the news, let’s remember that Iran is much bigger than most Americans think. Compared to European countries as a frame of reference, only Russia and Ukraine occupy a larger area. Iran’s population is larger than that of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain.

• U.S. military investigators “believe it likely” that the United States was responsible for Saturday’s attack on a girls’ school in southern Iran, Reuters reports, citing two unnamed U.S. officials. The New York Times’ own analysis indicates that the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time the United States was attacking an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
• The American sinking of the IRIS Dena (an Iranian frigate and not a destroyer, as I described it earlier this week) has complicated relations with third countries. This caused consternation in India, where the ship was returning (unarmed, the Iranians say) after a joint military exercise in which the United States was participating. Three Australian nationals were taken with the US military aboard the submarine that sank the Iranian warship.
• Israel has launched an attack on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut.
• Four Democrats joined the House Republican majority to block a war powers resolution that would have asserted some independence of Congress from President Trump.

Florida Bar investigating Lindsey Halligan

In a letter to an advocacy group that filed a complaint against former Acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the Florida Bar said an investigation into her was already underway. The New York Times first obtained the letter, which gives no details about the investigation.

January 6 never ends

• House Republicans are pressuring Trump’s Justice Department to bring criminal charges against Trump I White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson, who became the star witness in the Jan. 6 committee hearings, CNN reports. In recent days, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) made a false criminal referral of Hutchinson’s case to the Justice Department, accusing him of lying in his congressional testimony.
• Virginia Democrats have passed a bill that Gov. Abigail Spanberger (Democrat) is expected to sign that would prohibit schools from teaching that the Jan. 6 protest was a peaceful protest or that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election.

2026 Ephemeral

• TX-Sen: President Trump is set to endorse the re-election of Sen. John Cornyn (R) in a GOP primary runoff against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
• TX-23: While the dark sex scandal surrounding Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) lasted for weeks, the end came relatively quickly. On Tuesday, he was forced into a runoff in the GOP primary. On Wednesday, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Gonzales, and he admitted to an affair with a former staffer who committed suicide. On Thursday, leaders of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives asked him yesterday to end his re-election campaign, which he finally did late last night.
• MT-Sen: TPM’s Kate Riga on Montana Sen. Steve Daines misleading voters and giving his seat to his GOP-chosen heir.

Jeffrey Epstein Watch

Trump’s DOJ has released interviews previously withheld by the FBI with a woman who alleges Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s after she was introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein. The woman claims she was between 13 and 15 years old when Trump hit her after she bit his penis while he tried to force her to have oral sex. The White House called the allegation “completely baseless” and attacked the credibility of the anonymous accuser.

“Weak pace increasing”

One of the biggest surprises in writing Morning Memo was the response I received to occasionally immersing myself in music. I’ve said it before, but I can’t emphasize enough, how much of a restorative music fan I am. It’s embarrassing. This has been a lifelong gap in my personal development. But finding the courage, at the risk of public mortification, to share a little of what I love, has led to remarkably rich interactions with MM readers.

Case in point: While I was in Nashville last week covering the Abrego Garcia case, an MM reader contacted me and invited me to visit the new Country Music Hall of Fame exhibit in Muscle Shoals. “I know you’re a music guy,” he said. Rather than protest, I simply let go of that false impression and dove into the experience.

The exhibition really resonated with me, indulging in nostalgia as one would expect, but without flattening the complexities of this time and place. The curators collected far more memorabilia than I expected, including the piano that was used at FAME Studios for most of the 1960s and on which Aretha Franklin played her first hit: “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).” To set the mood, lots of faux wood grain is used to evoke the cheap mid-century paneling that was inside the studios.

The exhibit goes well beyond the narrowest definitions of country music to show how the Muscle Shoals influences musical genres, generations and racial divides. It maps the influence like a family tree that shows the musical DNA of Muscle Shoals still persisting decades after its emergence in northwest Alabama.

If you can’t do it yourself, here’s a good overview of what you’re missing:

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