Politics is a visual medium, and Kristi Noem casts a striking visual. Always has. When audiences see Kristi Noem, they instantly see two things:
- She’s a stunningly beautiful woman — especially for politics, a.k.a. “show business for ugly people.” From her beauty queen hair to her immaculate makeup to her lithe figure, not too many 54-year-old women look like she does. If you didn’t know any better and were told Noem was an ex-supermodel, you’d probably believe it.
- She’s phony, fake, and plastic.
It’s a helluva dichotomy, because beauty is a prized commodity. Looking good is a yuuge political asset. (Heck, Gavin Newsom built his career on it.) Everything else being equal, audiences select the more attractive option.
Pretty privilege is a real thing.
But on the other hand, being transparently phony isn’t prized or admired. It’s mocked and derided.
Audiences point at it and laugh.
And Kristi Noem had become the female equivalent of a blatantly obvious toupee: She has the kind of fakeness you can spot from across the room.
But that wasn’t her fatal flaw. Politics has always attracted a disproportionate number of arrogant-yet-insecure people — and in a weird way, their insecurities are humanizing.
It means that they struggle with the same things we do.
Nor was Noem’s fatal flaw her conduct as secretary of homeland security. Don’t get me wrong — she wasn’t knocking it out of the park — but her metrics were outstanding: We finally secured our borders, removed 2.5 million illegal immigrants from our country, cut fentanyl trafficking by 56%, and lowered drug overdose deaths by 21%. It all played a major role in our national crime rate plunging to a 125-year low.
Just going by the numbers, she was, perhaps, the most successful homeland security secretary in U.S. history.
(She certainly thinks so: On March 5, the same day President Donald Trump booted her out of his cabinet, her office released a press release with the subhead, “Secretary Noem Has Been the Most Successful DHS Secretary in History.”)
But those numbers, alas, don’t tell the whole story.
Noem was a political nightmare for Trump. Voters (58%) wanted her fired.
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) March 6, 2026
Her net approval rating was underwater in every single poll taken during Trump's 2nd term.
Moreover, Noem was dragging Trump down. His net approval on immigration has dropped over 20 pts since last year. pic.twitter.com/uNWUjL9Xcp
There was the chaos in Minnesota — and her PR missteps that contributed to it. The slow pace of FEMA’s disaster relief. Her three luxury jets. And not to mention the bizarreness of her $220 million ad campaign, which seemed less tactical and more self-serving:
Kristi Noem is out at DHS. Here's a TV commercial of her on a horse, filmed five months ago at Mount Rushmore, for an ad campaign that cost more than $200 million pic.twitter.com/U1RtvlYc4w
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) March 5, 2026
That ad wasn’t a one-off. During Noem’s tenure at homeland security, her office disseminated one audaciously self-praising press release after another — with the actual accomplishments secondary to singing her praises.
“All hail the glory of Kristi Noem!”
Yet that wasn’t the moment she lost the American people either: We’re surprisingly tolerant of a politician’s ego, because we understand that it comes with the territory. (President Trump isn’t exactly known for his humility, either.) Noem certainly isn’t the first politician to think highly of herself.
But she’s the first female politician to use her husband as a PR prop — while refusing to deny that she’s still actively cheating on him with a workplace subordinate.
The “relationship” between Noem and Corey Lewandowski was, by numerous accounts, an open secret in D.C. Lewandowski, Trump’s (married) ex-campaign manager and current “special government employee” to DHS, was described by the Wall Street Journal as Noem’s “de facto chief-of-staff.” Whatever their relationship was, they were exceptionally close.
There were reports he fired a pilot for leaving one of Noem’s blankets on a plane — and then hastily rehired him when nobody else could fly them home.
It all led to the nasty specter of her testimony before the House and Senate. Her husband of 34 years, Bryon Noem, was strategically seated in the front row behind her. Noem was asked, under oath, if she and Lewandowski had/have a “sexual relationship” and she declined to deny it.
We can only speculate what Mr. Noem was thinking.
PR props are explicitly designed to influence public opinion, so it’s fair and legitimate for the public to critique them. The New York Post certainly did.
Its headline was: “The Real Reason Why Kristi Noem’s Cuckold Husband Stayed Married to Her Through Corey Lewandowski ‘Humiliation.’”
(Oof. That’s just brutal.)
Bryon Noem‘s family members are hoping he finally leaves his wife, embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, after the ultimate “humiliation” from her alleged affair with a top adviser — but fear he’ll continue to stay in his marriage due to his Christian faith and commitment to his vows.
Members of the extended family of Bryon Noem told The Post on Friday that the South Dakota businessman has long felt it was his religious duty to stand behind his wife — even as the very public scandal rocks their marriage.
“He said he decided about 20 years ago that it was his calling from God to support her in whatever she decided to do,” one family member said. “So he has put up with the humiliation. We will see if he sticks with her now.”
We can speculate. His family can speculate. The New York Post can speculate. But in truth, none of us ever know the inner workings of anyone else’s marriage. That’s their business and nobody else’s.
Yet we know this: Kristi and Bryon have three children. They vowed to love, honor, and cherish each other above all else. This means, at a bare-freaking-minimum, they owe each other kindness and respect.
Using your husband as a PR prop — while continuing an extramarital affair that the whole world knows about — is simply cruel. It’s greedy and vicious.
And it’s so very, very ugly.
That’s the moment Kristi Noem’s political future went up in smoke: Yes, she’s a very beautiful woman. (Even if her beauty was, ahem, “enhanced” with Botox and/or a scalpel.) From a distance, she’s still one of the most strikingly beautiful women in all of politics.
But up close?
She’s gross and ugly.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First: It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battlelines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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