Politics as theatre. Celebrity as currency. Wellness as religion. And power as the only real language in the room. Subscribe to PRIMAL SCREAM with Joanna Coles on Substack for exclusive news, reviews and commentary.
History was made on Capitol Hill this week, though not quite in the triumphant, glass-ceiling-smashing way the sisterhood once imagined.
The moment arrived when California congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove leaned in, adjusted her microphone, and delivered a question that ricocheted through Washington’s echo chamber of gossip, ambition, and barely concealed schadenfreude:
“Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as Director of Department of Homeland Security, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?”
For a beat, those attending the Judiciary Oversight hearings seemed to stop breathing.
Not because Washington is unfamiliar with sexual scandal—quite the opposite. But because it is extraordinarily rare (and possibly the first time in U.S. history) that a woman serving in high office was questioned so bluntly and publicly about sleeping with an employee. Her subordinate.
For decades, the script has run the other way. The powerful man, the younger woman, the career-ending revelation. (Well, for her always, for him occasionally.)
After insisting “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Bill Clinton turned an entire presidency into a grammar lesson with the immortal line, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” John Edwards was interrogated about whether he had impregnated a campaign videographer while his wife was dying of cancer. David Petraeus, the four-star general turned CIA director, saw a glittering career detonate after investigators uncovered his relationship with biographer Paula Broadwell, who, quick aside here, had a riveting push-up contest with Jon Stewart.
The hierarchy has always been clear: powerful man, subordinate woman, undeniable desire, catastrophic fallout.
But this week the script flipped. Noem, the now-ex DHS Secretary, was in the hot seat. Known in some Washington corners as “ICE Barbie,” a nickname bestowed by The Daily Beast to reflect her meticulously lacquered presentation and the department’s hard-line immigration theatrics, she listened to the question while batting her familiar and absurdly long false eyelashes.
Her answer to Kamlager-Dove’s question flowed with ease, and was delivered so calmly that one could only imagine the moment had been rehearsed. But it still didn’t quite land.
“Mr. Chairman, I am shocked,” Noem said, not seeming remotely shocked, “that we are going down and peddling tabloid garbage questions in this Committee today.”
As Rep. Kamlager-Dove tried to explain that this non-denial denial was itself damning, and that Noem should have welcomed the chance to answer the question, Noem talked over her, repeating the word “garbage” two times.
This repetition had a certain accidental poetry. Last year, The Daily Beast’s political newsletter The Swamp—which you can now subscribe to here on Substack, by the way—reported that Lewandowski had been spotted taking out the garbage from Noem’s Washington apartment, a detail so domestically specific it practically wrote the punchline itself.
Lewandowski comes with one of the more colorful résumés in modern political consulting. During the 2016 Trump campaign, he was charged with battery after grabbing a reporter; the case was later dropped, but left a black mark on his reputation. He was eventually pushed out of the Trump campaign amid months of internal chaos and complaints about his conduct.
In 2021, Lewandowski resurfaced like an unflushed turd after a Republican donor accused him of sexual harassment at a Las Vegas event. These allegations were serious enough that even Trump’s famously elastic tolerance for scandal couldn’t find a way to brush them off. Once again, Lewandowski was sidelined.
Along the way, Lewandowski has accumulated a reputation for combative run-ins with journalists and colleagues alike, making him less the quiet strategist type and more the political equivalent of a bar fight waiting to happen. Except for a stint at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute for Politics, Lewandowski did not fit the mold typically associated with sober national-security advice.
Yet the allegations swirling around Noem and Lewandowski reportedly go further than mere Beltway flirtation. According to reports, the pair traveled aboard a luxury jet outfitted with a double bed and four television screens, the mile-high boudoir allegedly used on various work-adjacent trips. The details are so extravagant, they sound less like government business and more like Succession.
Noem’s own disastrous record at Homeland Security included one of the more jaw-dropping uses of taxpayer money in recent memory: a $200 million advertising campaign urging undocumented migrants to “self-deport.” The ads—lavish, dramatic, and featuring Noem prominently—felt less like immigration enforcement and more like a taxpayer-funded personal branding exercise.
But wait, there’s more! The alleged impropriety has spread beyond Noem’s trash cans.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has also faced accusations of an inappropriate relationship involving a member of her security detail, while her husband was reportedly barred from entering parts of her workplace after allegations that he sexually harassed at least one female employee.
It’s the kind of tawdry, chaotic spectacle that increasingly defines Trump’s moronocracy, a governing style where spectacle outruns competence and scandals arrive via DoorDash.
There is, however, a deeper and more uncomfortable reflection lurking beneath the tabloid headlines.
For decades, advocates of gender equality argued, correctly, that women deserved to be at the table where decisions were being made. They were half the population; fairness demanded representation. But there was also a secondary argument, often floated with hopeful certainty: that women would handle power more responsibly than men.
Less ego. Less recklessness. Fewer scandals. Be best.
Recent events in Washington have punched a hole in that hypothesis. From alleged jet-set escapades to the alleged workplace drama (and travel fraud), the emerging lesson is not that women are immune to the temptations of power. It is that they are perfectly capable of being corrupted. At least two powerful women in the Trump Administration have shown that they are no better than men.
Which, in its own way, is equality.
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