kristi noem quietly fails upward into hemispheric security "advisor" role
Kristi Noem, seen here in her natural habitat: an official-looking role with unofficial friends and undefined responsibilities.
Kristi Noem is no longer Trump’s special envoy for the grandly titled Shield of the Americas initiative, which sounds less like foreign policy and more like a Marvel knockoff you’d find in the bargain bin at Dollar Tree. Her envoy status "expired" last month, the State Department says — a very polite way of saying, "we’re not doing this cosplay title anymore" — but don’t worry, she’s still inside the building. She’s now a "senior advisor" to Deputy Secretary David Landau, continuing to work on the same portfolio, just with fewer press releases and more plausible deniability.
This is the same Kristi Noem who was bounced from Homeland Security amid growing scrutiny of her management and the mysterious gravitational pull of her adviser Corey Lewandowski, who kept showing up in photos on her five-country tour despite having no official job at State. So naturally, after questions about her leadership and his shadow influence, the solution was to slide her sideways into a vague diplomatic role where she could keep doing high-level meetings with Latin American leaders while everyone pretends the title situation is just a clerical detail.
Even after the envoy label quietly disappeared before the U.N. General Assembly, Noem was still being publicly introduced by Ecuador’s president as the Shield of the Americas envoy and was thanked by Trump himself for doing a "really terrific job." The job, it turns out, was mostly a handful of photo-op–friendly meetings in Quito, Washington, and on the sidelines of the U.N., plus whatever behind-the-scenes influence comes with being a Trumpworld loyalist who never actually leaves, just gets refiled. The hemisphere’s security architecture is apparently being run like a reality show cast reunion: nobody knows exactly what they do now, but they’re still on camera.
