Accension by Assertion

 Trump has announced that Kristi Noem is out as Secretary of Homeland Security.

First and foremost, in the words of my favorite urban poet, Fred Flintstone:

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

But let’s explore how utterly weird this is.

We have normalized insanity so thoroughly that a president can announce on his own social-media platform that a Cabinet secretary is out, that a sitting United States senator will “assume office” on a date certain, and people react as if this is just ordinary government. It is not. Trump announced Noem’s departure on social media and said Senator Markwayne Mullin would take over on March 31.

Normally, a president asks for or accepts a Cabinet secretary’s resignation and then moves through the usual nomination process for a replacement. Cabinet officers are not installed by post; they are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

And that is where this gets even stranger. Markwayne Mullin cannot simply “assume office” as Secretary of Homeland Security because a date was typed into social media. The DHS secretary is a Senate-confirmed Cabinet position. On top of that, Mullin is still a sitting U.S. senator, and the Constitution bars a member of Congress from simultaneously holding another federal office. He can be nominated. He can sit through hearings. But he cannot lawfully hold the office while still serving in the Senate.

And here is the part that really should make people stop pretending this is normal: Earlier this year, after a racist video was posted from Trump’s account, the White House said a staffer had posted it in error, and the post was deleted. Fine. But if an ugly post can be brushed off as “that was a staffer,” they do not get to turn around and demand that a different post from that same account be treated as a self-executing constitutional instrument. Either that feed is an official presidential vehicle, or it is a chaotic account with built-in plausible deniability. It cannot be both, depending on which excuse is more convenient that day.

And, oh yeah... if the public criticism of Kristi Noem is that she has been harsh, performative, and needlessly combative, then the natural question is: why is the immediate replacement choice a senator best known for trying to start a fistfight with a Teamsters president during a Senate hearing?

That actually happened. During a 2023 hearing, Senator Markwayne Mullin challenged Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien to a fight right there in the committee room until Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, shut it down with the immortal line:

This is a hearing, not a cage match.

So if the concern is tone, professionalism, and seriousness in running the Department of Homeland Security, replacing Noem with the guy who nearly turned the Senate into UFC on C-SPAN does not exactly scream “course correction.”

So no, “March 31” is not some magic phrase that completes the transition. At most, it announces intent. It does not complete the constitutional steps required to make Mullin the lawful Secretary of Homeland Security. We have gotten so used to government by stunt that people now confuse a post with a process. They are not the same thing.

I'm just saying