Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has urged Donald Trump to dump Kristi Noem while he still controls the Senate.
The Homeland Security secretary, 54, is widely considered to have become a liability to the president and his administration, having drawn national criticism for her crude attempts to bulldoze through the facts after the killings of two protesters by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Trump, 79, publicly insists Noem’s job is safe, telling reporters this week that he does not expect her to step down and saying he thinks she is doing “a very good job,” even after a two-hour crisis meeting crisis meeting at the Oval Office with Noem and her close aide, Corey Lewandowski.
But Spicer, 54, said that in Trump’s orbit, once a lieutenant flips from asset to liability, they are finished—and if anyone should know, it’s him.
“I would say this—and I speak from personal experience—when you cross the Rubicon of good news to bad news, you never come back in Trumpworld,” he told The Huddle, the podcast he co-hosts with political journalist Rachael Bade, on Monday.
“I don’t see how Noem comes back from this. She was already on thin ice. This was a complete and utter disaster.”
Spicer warned that Noem has enraged core Trump constituencies. “You have problems within MAGAworld now. You’ve got the NRA” and “145 members of the House saying they’re gonna impeach her,” he said, arguing that aides must decide “whether to try to wait it out—or take the nearest off-ramp.”
He urged the administration to “replace her now while you still control the Senate… You do not want to have to negotiate [with Democrats] over your next DHS secretary,” he said, referring to the possibility that Republicans could lose control of the Senate at this year’s midterms.
The warning carries extra sting given Spicer’s own history. The former Republican National Committee strategist served as Trump’s first press secretary in 2017 and became infamous for making false claims.
He resigned that July after clashing with Trump over the hiring of Anthony Scaramucci as communications director.
Noem, a former South Dakota governor appointed as Homeland Security secretary last January, has become the face of the president’s mass deportation agenda—earning the nickname “ICE Barbie” for her love of dressing up in paramilitary garb for photo opportunities.
Her department launched an aggressive but controversial nationwide immigration crackdown, focusing on a series of Democrat-run “sanctuary cities.”
Over the past six weeks, thousands of federal immigrant agents have descended on Minneapolis, triggering protests that have seen two U.S. citizens, mom Renee Nicole Good and Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti, both 37, fatally shot.
At the heart of the backlash is Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, 55, a longtime sector chief whom Noem elevated into a roaming national field commander for high-profile raids.
Critics, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, seized on his trench-coat-and-gloves look after a DHS promo video featuring him in a long black coat drew Nazi comparisons.
After Bovino’s agents were involved in Pretti’s fatal Jan. 24 shooting, internal critics told the Beast that Noem’s reliance on his theatrics was a “miscalculation” that turned the president’s deportation drive into a political crisis.
Trump has since tried to steady the operation by sidelining Noem’s team.
As Bade reported Monday in a Substack post titled “Inside Trump’s Minnesota U-Turn,” the president has “pumped the brakes” on the crackdown—personally calling local Democratic leaders—and has “sidelined” Noem and Bovino, “the face of ICE’s antagonistic deportation efforts,” in favor of border czar Tom Homan, 64, a career ICE official once honored by Barack Obama.
Spicer told viewers that Bovino’s rapid fall was also about score-settling. He described Noem and Homan as “oil and water” and said Homan moved quickly to strip Noem’s favorite enforcer of his national “commander-at-large” title.
“What’s Homan’s first act? Get the Noem people out,” Spicer said, noting that Bovino was told he could return to his sector command in California but would no longer run the operation.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and DHS for comment.
