Noem: The Narcissist's Narcissist

Trump's gun-toting puppy-killing immigrant-abusing DHS head was skewered on South Park. But her only complaint is about her looks.

SPOILER ALERT: This post is unapologetically replete with spoilers. Even if you read this post first, be sure to track down and watch the South Park episode while you are still allowed.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem took time out from her busy schedule overseeing the construction of concentration camps in the U.S. to bring a complaint to the Glenn Beck Show, in whatever sad corner of the internet he managed to cobble together an audience, and commenced to whining about the perceived slights she received to her fragile ego in the most recent South Park episode.

“It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look.” (She must thinks her boss is extremely lazy for his long history of making fun of women for how they look.)

Then in practically the next breath:

“If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that.”

The South Park guys did, in fact, excoriate her based on the way she’s leading DHS and ICE.

Noem apparently doesn’t view as criticism the sequence of ICE rounding up brown people not only at Home Depot but also in heaven.

She doesn’t complain about the scathing satirical ad embedded in the South Park episode that highlights the cruelty and structural incompetence of ICE and its current hiring practices.

She doesn’t seem to mind that she’s portrayed as shooting every dog she comes in contact with.

She seems OK with Mar-A-Lago being portrayed as a latter-day Fantasy Island, complete with underage girls under duress massaging elderly white men.

She’s even OK with the portrayal of Trump calling his VP stupid and kicking him in the head.

She doesn’t even feign outrage at the sexual innuendos a more seasoned Republican politician would rail against.

No. None of that. Her line in the sand is her characterization as a melting-faced media-obsessed cosplaying ICE agent. That’s a bridge too far.

Of course, in that same interview she claimed that she hadn’t even watch the episode.

(Despite her denial, I can’t get this image out of my head of her, sitting on her couch in an adult onesie with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a bag of Takis, pressing the rewind button on her DVR over and over again, mascara rolling down her filler-filled cheeks.)

Noem is the epitome of a Trump appointee. Completely unqualified? Check. A demonstrated lack of moral bearings? Check. Willing to do her boss’s bidding, no matter what the cost to the nation, its citizens, and democracy itself? Check.

And there’s one more pre-requisite: A complete void where a sense of humor should be.

Trump himself has pronounced that South Park has become irrelevant, but they’re garnering some of the best ratings they’ve ever had. And, for something so irrelevant, Trump and his appointees seem to be spending an awful lot of time talking about it.

Some have even tried to use the episode to their advantage. An ICE X/Twitter post featured a still from the show. J.D. Vance, also mocked in the show, declared that he had finally “made it.” Even Charlie Kirk, never one to miss an opportunity to get on the bandwagon, switched his online avatar to the unflattering South Park caricature.

But this is typical of Trump and the gang. They end up drawing more attention to the criticism of themselves and their policies than the initial criticism would have otherwise attracted. It shouldn’t be overlooked, however, that creating a stir over petty things is a standard Trumpian technique to distract the public from the sometimes monumental horrific things they’re doing.

These days, the scandal that they’re trying the most to distract from (and having the least success in that distraction) is the Epstein files and the growing pile of contradictions, excuses, and evidence of the long, dubious relationship between Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. So far, I’ve barely written about that toxic mess, but it’s probably inevitable that I’ll dig into it in future posts.