Bulwark Takes - GOP Senators Suddenly Discover Kristi Noem Is a Problem

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Sam Stein, JVL and Andrew Egger give their takes on the chaotic and dramatic Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Republican senators sharply questioned Noem over her leadership at DHS, ICE's deadly actions in Minnesota, and her department’s $220 million ad campaign featuring Noem front and center. They also debate a bigger question: Is Noem being set up as the scapegoat? With DHS funding frozen and Republicans under pressure, are some in the GOP trying to sacrifice the secretary to avoid deeper reforms to ICE and immigration enforcement?Delegate smarter and grow faster. Post your job for free at Upwork.com and connect with top freelance talent today.

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and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. Hey, everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the book. I'm here with JVL and Andrew Eger, and we've been watching a pretty spicy at times, hearing with Christy Noam at the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning.

Spicy in that there was at least one unexpected Republican who grilled the secretary very hard. And then there was a very theatrical moment with Senator Tom Tillis that I know JVL wants to merit in on involved talk of castrated goats and dog killing and all that stuff. Before we get into that, subscribe to the feed. I really appreciate it. So, Andrew, you've been watching this with me. What's like that 30,000 foot takeaway from this hearing that happened this morning? Yeah. So we knew what we were kind of expecting to get from most Republicans.

right it was come in talk about how bad the Biden administration was on immigration talk about how good of a job you guys are doing and we got plenty of that but like you say there were a couple of somewhat notable defections we were not really surprised that Tom Tillis who is lame ducked out and has a bit of reputation now for like letting his freak flag fly a little bit on on some of these Republicans not super surprised that he went after known but very surprised by sort of the depth of the attack and the sort of intensity of it that's not really his his bag usually is getting all sort of like bulgy-eyed and spittle, flecked, and just mad. And then even more surprising was what we saw from Senator Kennedy, who's also Republican,

and who is very much not like a thorn in the side of the administration on pretty much anything, not just going after Noem, but going after her pretty aggressively for a lot of the same reasons, you know, people like us have been criticizing her leadership for quite some time, talking about, you know, just the absolute sort of disaster of enforcement in Minneapolis that led to the killings of Alex Prattie and Renee Good. And really trying it sometimes it seemed like to drive a wedge between Noam and the White House in some of the questions he was asking. So that was sort of unexpected as well. Let's play the clip of him Kennedy asking about the use of ads. So the background here is DHS has ungodly amounts of money to spend because of the big beautiful bill. Like insane amounts of

money to spend. And I actually saw a data point on this ad impact, which tracks all this stuff, right, all the ad spending money that happens over the course of the election. They looked at expenditures today in the midterm election. And by far in a way, the top overall advertiser for the midterm election cycle was the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. $79 million in ads. They've run. The next closest was Tom Steyer. Governor California at $58 million. Anyway, so Kennedy's like, why are you running all these ads in which you, Christy Knoem, are basically front and center? Like this is the Trump administration's immigration policy.

Shouldn't this be about deportations. Here's how it went. Let's play the video. But the president approved ahead of time, you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently. Yes, sir, we went through the legal processes. Did it correct? Did the president know you were going to do this? Yes.

He did? Yes. Okay. And one thing, Senator, I think, would be helpful to know is how effective that communications has been. Well, they were effectively. In your name recognition. I mean, I personally just, I mean, to me, it puts the president in a terribly awkward spot. And I just, I'm not saying you're not telling the truth.

It's just hard for me to believe. You know, and the president, as I do that you said, Mr. President, here's some ads I've cut and I'm going to spend $220 million running them that he would have agreed to that. All right, so JVL, what do you make of that? How could he ever possibly have known? Christine Homme would do this. I guys, I'm sorry. I don't mean to short circuit this whole exercise here, but watching people who voted to confirm her.

Right. Suddenly get all chesty about, I have no idea of this. Go fuck yourselves. That's basically how I feel about it. Go fuck yourself, Kennedy. And I'm sorry. And he's,

he's willing to take after Christy Gnome because he's too shy to go after Secretary Kennedy who's bringing back measles. I'm sorry, but these people are menaces. And they should get zero credit for now belatedly in a committee meeting where they think that maybe they're actually helping Trump by separating the weak one from the herd.

And maybe if they, so long as they don't blame Donald Trump or say that the mission is bad or say that, boy, gee, that's what shouldn't have given you guys $11 to a gazillion dollars. So only they don't do that, then they're being responsible people working in government. Right. I mean, Kennedy's point was he went after her for the ads that she's run and whether or not she was being unfair to Stephen Miller.

That was the other point of attention. How could you throw Mr. Miller under the bus? You know, that was it. So it wasn't like, you know, now he did. I will give him, I'm not giving him credit. I will say he did ask about the decision to call Renee Good and Alex Pretti domestic terrorists. And Nome said, what was it? She was it drew some distinction. She said, I didn't call him domestic terrorists, but I said they may have engaged in acts of domestic terrorism as if there's a fucking difference. Yes, she said that. She said a

bunch of different things. I don't know if we have clips of this, but it was it was some of that. It was some of, well, look, you know, it was a chaotic situation. And I was responding to reports from the ground and and you know I can't imagine what her parents went what their parents went through I was just relying on what my agents told me. Yeah. That was it. Yeah. That was it. Well, if so, have those agents been fired because they lied to you and made you look like a fucking idiot? Or just say, I regret saying it. So if she was relying on the things from that the agent told her, then the agents lied to her and are they being held accountable? Are there, are there HR proceedings against them? No, we could play Klobuchar because I think Klobuchar, because I think Klobuchar pushed

specifically on this. And to your point, Javiel, she never once says, I regret doing it, ever. No. Ever. She just said, well, I was giving bad information. Nary an apology, never saying, well, you know, we're looking into it and I shouldn't have jumped to hasty conclusions or anything like that. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Prettie, when I spoke to Alex's parents,

they told me that you calling him a domestic terrorist. This was directly from them the day after he was killed. a nurse in our VA, Alex, one of the most hurtful things they could ever imagine was said by you about their son. Do you have anything you want to say to Alex Prattie's parents? We were relying in the hours after that incident that was so horrific on information we were getting from the ground from our agents. I just asked if you had anything you wanted to say to the parents or to the family of Renee Good after you called them domestic terrorists. I can imagine what they have gone through in the loss of their son, in the loss of their family members. But how about specifically calling them domestic terrorists without any evidence of that?

Sir, I did, ma'am, I did not call him a domestic terrorist. I said it appeared to be an incident of. I think the parents saw it for what it was. You frozen-faced fucking ghoul. I mean, I'm sorry. And you know what? Clobo? Not doing the best job there.

Like not coming with the actual receipts, not going at or hard. Right? Not saying, oh, no, no, here's what you actually said. They could have played the video. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm too hot for you. I know that we're all supposed to like be, you know, playing it cool.

It's a cool medium the YouTube is. Got a button up. Yeah. This is like this is unfucking believable. Right. It really does put just, I mean, like we, it's all been happening out there. for days and days and weeks and weeks, and we've been swimming in it, all the horror that's been coming out of Minneapolis, all of the just ridiculous decision-making that happened to put those policies in place. And then just the unbelievable way that her department at her leadership decided to respond in real time to all of these actions.

I mean, I don't know, JVL. I thought Klobuchar did a pretty good job of putting the specific question to her of, look, a horrible thing happened. And it was your people who did it. It was your people who killed these citizens, but it wasn't just that they harmed the families of Alex Pruddy and Renee Good. You harmed them. You harmed them by immediately getting out there and smearing them in this way. And they said that that was actually maybe the most painful thing, seeing their government do that. And I mean, what's she going to say? I mean, there's a reason why some Republicans want to hang her out to dry for this, right?

I mean, there's a reason why it's not a matter of credit, really. It's just like the bloodless real politic of this thing. me play a game. What if you, what if you asked what she, what's you going to say? Would it really been that harmful to say, we shouldn't have done it? We acted hastily. We spoke hastily. That would have been harmful. Can't say that. I mean, in Trump world, right? In Trump world, you can't ever, it's dominance politics and you cannot apologize. You cannot ever admit a mystique in Trump world. That would get her fired. And we've seen that. I mean, that's happened repeatedly in this administration. You know, any lawyer who like gives an inch in a court setting or whatever is immediately, you know,

gets the shepherd's crook and gets yanked out of there. The only thing that is keeping Christy Gnome in her job, despite the fact that everybody knows what a dumpster fire she made of Minneapolis and has made of immigration enforcement all throughout the first year of Trump's term. The only thing that is keeping in her in her job is the fact that Donald Trump still gives her sort of like the divine imprimatur, right? I mean, she still has the mandate of heaven, even though so many people, even in her own agency, know that she's awful.

They're gunning for her. Corey has the mandate of heaven. Yes, exactly. Coral Lewandowski, who, you know, has an interesting... Her very special advisor. So special. They may or may not have a love plane. We don't know.

We don't know. That did come up today, by the way. They were asked about love play. But so she has only one mission, right? Her one mission is to continue to not lose the mandate of heaven. And that's why you can't apologize, even though everybody knows that you have fucked this up. But the context here, so here's, I want to just sort of hint at something that,

is in the air, which is that DHS funding is frozen right now. Okay, they obviously have a boatload of cash because of the big beautiful bill and they're they're going to be fine. ICE is going to be fine for sure. But DHS funding itself is frozen. Republicans turning on Nome in this context, at least Kennedy and Tillis that we're going to talk about in a second. I don't know.

There is a signal. There's some whiff up there that this is an effort for Republicans to try to signal to Democrats on the hill. Hey, if we get this. person out. If we turn on this person too, if we get new leadership at DHS, could we get to an agreement? That seems to me to be the context here. Now, let's turn to Tillus because Tillus, look, it was heavy on theatrics. There were some actual news breaks here in that he said, you know, he wants a DHS inspector general report, which has been stimmed. He said he's going to hold any

enblanc nomination until he gets a response. That's real. He says he will deny quorum on as many committees as I can, denying a quorum on committees until he gets a response after two weeks. That's real. Like, they need to actually have these quorums. So those are real steps. Everything else is very theatrical and enjoyable. Why don't we start? And I know where Javiel's is going to come down to this because Tills did vote for her. He did. And he only started speaking up once he decided to retire. Still, it was good theater. So let's start with the dog. And then we'll get to the cover up. You should know that if you're going out to a hunting lodge and you're putting pheasants out and you're putting dogs out, you don't take a puppy out there. A 14-month-old dog is

basically a teenager in dog years. You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time and training, and then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it's a leadership lesson about tough choices. It's in your book. We could play it if we had time. At that same lunch hour, you killed a goat, and you killed the goat because you said it was behaving badly. You are a farmer. You don't castrate a guy. They behave badly. You should have probably done that before, but my point is those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment,

not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. I think it is unlike what happened in Minneapolis. Also, I'm not sure about the goat castration. I just, not my area of expertise, and I were debating what the proper protocols are on goat constration. JVL. Was that book out before her confirmation hearing? Yes, of course.

Okay. So now he views the information that he had prior to voting for her as disqualifying. Bullard takes a sponsor by Upwork. One of the biggest growth hacks I've come across is realizing that you don't have to do it all yourself. The fastest growing businesses aren't doing more. They're just delegating smarter. And that's exactly what Upwork lets you do. Whether you need a developer for a sprint, a data analyst for a project, or marketing help you can turn on

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It's because these assholes sit up there in rage without ever considering saying, I can't believe I voted for you. I made a huge mistake. I got snowed in by you. You are utterly incompetent. You should never have been in this job. the Senate failed in its mission. And I personally, in my job, because you know what, Tillus is retiring.

Yeah. He doesn't, he has nothing left to gain. This is what I'm selling. It's the utter lack of personal responsibility for a thing they helped happen. I just can't count on that. I'm sorry. No, it's totally fair. He wants her fired, but he's not taking any responsibility for being there in the first place.

By the way, you know, a bunch of Democrats voted for her too. Did Fetterman? I'm sure Federman. Federman. Tim Kaine? Tim Kaine did? Alyssa Slotkin. Maggie Hassan.

Kim? Peters. No. I should have looked that up. We got to ask them about that. I did. I don't know. Any of them have any second thoughts about this?

We should have anything to say to the country for helping to put this woman in that job. Can I say one thing about that? Because I think this is pretty illustrative of like just something that's constantly happening with the Trump administration where like everything is so bad all the time that like things people get passes on things and things slip through that are like totally unconscionable on the merits like if you think back to the confirmation you know when when Trump was putting his cabinet together we were all hair on fire about robert f kennedy jr. We were all hair on fire about matt gates um i don't remember even remember who some of the

like truly Pete heggseth was was one of the was one of the tallsy gabard tulsie gabard and in the Ash Patel. Yeah, exactly. There were several. In kind of in the midst of all of that, you know, it's like, well, and then Donald Trump, you know, who got reelected to do, like, the mass deportations, I guess he gets to put somebody in charge to do mass deportations. I guess we're glad it's not actually like Corey Lewandowski who's going to be running the Department of Homeland Security. It's just this governor who, you know, CPAC really likes, whatever, wave her through. And like, it's not that it's not that there was not plenty of evidence to suggest that she was kind of an insane person before.

I mean, you talk about everything she put in that book. You talk about, you know, the sort of like abortive pre-presidential campaign. She kind of tried to run. I mean, like, there was, there were warning signs. But, like, when you compared her to those lunatics in advance, you can kind of see how these people, have some of these people got there. The problem is, like, that was already working with such a skewed view of reality because you were comparing her to some of, like, the biggest cranks in human history,

who also all got through, by the way, other than Matt Gates. Here's a little trivia. Who is Donald Trump's first DHS secretary? I don't know how to pronounce her name. Nielsen. Or no, that was second. The first one was Kelly. No?

John Kelly. First one. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. Long slide down. And Nielsen, yeah. So Kelly Nielsen ended up becoming soft-spoken Trump critics.

Yeah. I mean, am I wrong that there should be some accountability for for Democrats who voted for this? Because one of the things that happened is we get into confirmation world. And everyone's like, well, I can't vote against all of them because that'll look so partisan. I've got to find someone I can say yes to. And you know what? Like if you're, if you were Alyssa Slotkin, you said yes to this, you should have your face rubbed in it, I think. And you should have to answer for it and explain why you did it and why you think you were wrong.

If you think you're wrong, maybe a little Slotkin stands by that vote. And then what she's going to do differently going forward in her approach. to handling the Trump administration. This is the type of vote that if you have aspirations for higher office beyond the Senate, let's say you want to run for president, it will be held against you. People will absolutely hammer you for this vote. There will be consequences. And you're probably right.

It would be Hoover to get ahead of it now and just be like, if you're slocking, just be like, biggest regret in my life, that type of thing. But this will haunt her. Oh, but this is how you stop people from doing this stuff in the future. Right. I mean, if you're, this isn't purely about like just. getting, you know, accountability for the sake of accountability, although that's nice. It would be nice to have some of that.

It feels like we live in a world with almost zero accountability for anybody. But if the idea is this whole process is broken because you have people in the United States Senate who simply do not take their jobs seriously when it comes to advising consent and confirmation of cabinet level nominees. And the only way to do that is to punish people who who treat it like a joke. Right. There's a number. I'm sort of confused with this because I'm looking up the roll call. Now, there are seven people who did, seven senators who did not vote. And I can't, why?

I'm just wrap. I can't remember this. I will note that. Raphael Warnock was one of them. Yep. Brian Schatz was another one who did not vote. Somebody from Hawaii. Yeah, Brian Schatz.

Yeah. Yeah. Let me just close with. Because I want to give, I know we're being rightfully hard on centers for not doing more and not explaining the votes. But I do want to give at least a little bit of kudos to Tillis. Because there are ways to go out of office that you can just slink and say, you know, and I'm going to just get a lobbying gig and I'm not going to rock the boat. And, you know, I got to still work in this town. I don't want to like fuck over Trump and all that stuff.

Whatever. This guy at least is putting some elbow grease into the criticisms here. And he has spoken out, unlike a lot of his other retiring Republican colleagues, about what happened in Minnesota. Okay? And, like, he's been very, very critical of this. I want to play him talking about the cover up here because this was a moment where, I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker for the shit,

but I genuinely thought that here's a guy who is pissed, who really doesn't like what happened and doesn't want to see it happen again. So let's play the clip, and you can tell me why I'm wrong. The way you're going about deporting them is wrong. The fact that you can't admit to a mistake, which looks like under investigation, it's going to prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Pettie probably should not have been shot in the face and in the back. Law enforcement needs to learn from that. You don't protect them by not looking after the facts. Not only should the FBI be investigating it, but every single law enforcement agency in that jurisdiction should be invited to it.

So our law enforcement officers do not have this paw cast upon them. One of the reasons why ICE officers are having threats and damn the people that threaten ICE officers, because so many of them are doing a good job, is because you've cast a pall on them by acting like we should investigate things differently. Officer-involved shootings have a formula that we should go through every time. All right. The ICE part, no. The first part, yes. Am I wrong? I mean, I genuinely struggle with this because you're not wrong. this is a case of defining deviancy down, right? And so it's only when you compare him against the people who are doing much, much worse,

that you start to say, well, then, you know, like, yeah, he's, and I guess everything is relative, right? I mean, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And if you want more people doing what Tom Tillis should do, then you shouldn't sit here like I am screaming at him. I take all of that. But this isn't early days. You know, it's not 2017 when the future is still uncertain. We don't quite know where it's heading. And maybe it won't be so bad.

Like, we do have masked secret police running around the country abducting people and killing citizens. We do have journalists being arrested. We do have an unconstitutional war going on. Like, I feel like we know directionally where this is all heading. And everyone's just kind of hoping that it works out fine. Right. but I don't know I don't I don't Andrew where are you on this you you are typically much more sensible sensible than I am I I just I just wanted to say I don't know about that I just wanted to say

one thing about sort of the the direction of these of these things because because both tillis and Kennedy do sort of the same thing where they are kind of trying to like send christianome out as the scapegoat bearing the sins of the of the government into the wilderness right and I and And Kennedy was a little bit more sort of like, you know, blunt about it. He's like, how dare you impugn our great patriots like Stephen Miller? But even Tillis a little bit is doing that with that, with the line about ICE there, where he's basically saying, like, look, like, for the most part, this agency is doing exactly what we wanted to be doing. And it's, you know, it's the brave men and women and the Patriots of Ice.

And it's really just Christy's fault that things are bad. But like this kind of gets to what you were saying a minute ago, Sam, about this actually being. And again, I don't know whether Tillis or Kennedy have this specifically. in their mind, but there does appear to be this effort to make her the scapegoat for all of this stuff and to cast her out instead of getting any of the totally obviously needed and like perfectly reasonable and honestly kind of minor reforms to DHS that Democrats are demanding in order to fund the agency, which is stuff like keep your body cams on and your masks off and wear a badge and a uniform and like do targeted enforcement and don't randomly sweep up protesters

and people that you think look like they could be illegal because they're minorities. Like, like the idea that this would be the pitch. Again, I don't know 100% that this is what Tillis or what Kennedy is thinking, but that's kind of the upshot of these lines of attack, right? It's like, let's all agree that it's Christy who's the problem, and then we can get her out of there and ICE can go back to, you know, doing its great patriotic work without any of these reforms that Democrats have demanded. And I think if Democrats were to accept that, it would be real of it.

That's such a good point, Andrew. And in a way, it makes it more dangerous, right? I mean, not everyone needs to be a crazy pants accelerationist the way I am. But saying, like, yes, all of this stuff is fundamentally good and we should be doing it, but we should be doing it more quietly so that people don't get upset about it. And so your sin, Christyneum, is doing it publicly and making people upset. That's dangerous, right? That is swapping out Bovino for Homan in Minneapolis while you're still doing all the same stuff.

And I don't know that that actually helps. No, probably doesn't help. All right. I have one last thing I want to mention, but I'm going to leave it after this. Katie Britt. Katie Britt had a very glossy New York Times piece written about her about how she could not stop thinking about Liam Ramos, the five-year-old kid who was abducted from a school in Minneapolis. We talked to the superintendent of the school district when we were up there and sent to Texas and had a huge ordeal.

Ended up back in Minneapolis. But Katie Bay could not stop thinking about this. And she had a huge piece in the year time during about how concerned she was about Liam Ramos and how it affected her and her family life and all that stuff. She had a chance to ask Christy Noam questions today as part of the Judiciary Committee. And I listened to the whole thing because I assumed someone who was deeply moved by the Liam Ramos story and couldn't stop thinking about it would ask a question. about it. She did not. Not a single question about Liam Ramos. It was about how ICE had arrested people like Jared Fogle, the old subway guy and P. Diddy and how they were not Nazis. So that was how Katie Britt spent her time apparently not thinking about Liam Ramos, at least in that 10 minutes

I've been. So I'm going to leave it at that. JVL. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Really appreciate it. For those who watched, thank you for watching. Subscribe to the feed where you get great recaps like this. Talk to you guys later. Bell Air Direct app includes crash assist, which detects an accident the moment it happens, and even offers you emergency assistance at the tap of a button. Okay, but what if I don't have an accident? Well, just keep on, keeping on. Bell Air Direct, insurance, simplified.

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