The Exhaustion of Being Governed by Liars

As Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem now presides over one of the most powerful bureaucracies in the federal government. An agency tasked with security, law, and human consequence. What a show.

Kristi Noem is not governing so much as managing a lie that has grown too large to control. It is the lie that toughness is leadership, that cruelty is clarity, and that repeating something loudly enough—no matter how false—eventually turns it into truth. Her administration does not merely traffic in this lie; it depends on it. Without it, the whole performance collapses.

Noem presents herself as the embodiment of American resolve: boots planted, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed toward an ever-convenient enemy. But behind the posture is an administration exhausted by its own contradictions, straining to maintain coherence while orbiting a singular, unspoken imperative, protect the feelings of a bloated, orange narcissist whose approval remains the movement’s oxygen. Every policy, every press conference, every hollow declaration of “freedom” bends toward one goal: keep him from crying.

The frustration this administration imposes on the public is not incidental; it is structural. Governance is replaced with grievance. Complexity is dismissed as weakness. Expertise is treated as betrayal. When reality intrudes—through data, law, or lived human consequence—it is waved away with slogans and staged backdrops. The border becomes a theater set. Law enforcement becomes a costume. The Constitution becomes a prop to be invoked or ignored depending on the audience.

Noem’s role in this ecosystem is to look serious while saying unserious things. She speaks with absolute certainty about problems she refuses to understand and solutions she has no intention of implementing. The point is not to solve anything. The point is to signal allegiance upward while projecting authority downward. It is governance as intimidation, leadership as glare.

And the lies, endless, repetitive, insultingly transparent—persist because they must. To admit error would be to crack the illusion, and cracking the illusion risks upsetting the central figure around whom all of this spins. So the administration doubles down. Facts are dismissed as partisan. Journalists are cast as enemies. Entire communities are reduced to caricatures, blamed for problems they did not create and punished for existing in ways that complicate a talking point.

What makes this especially corrosive is the insistence that the public is stupid enough to accept it. That voters will not notice the gap between rhetoric and reality. That families affected by policy will be soothed by photo ops. That fear can substitute indefinitely for trust. It is an administration that governs through contempt—contempt for institutions, for dissent, and for the intelligence of the people it claims to represent.

Kristi Noem does not push back against this dynamic because she cannot. Her political future depends on staying in character. Any deviation—any hint of independence—risks exile from a movement that devours disloyalty with relish. So she performs. She smiles at cruelty. She nods at nonsense. She repeats lies already disproven because truth is no longer the currency of advancement; obedience is.

Meanwhile, the consequences accumulate. Communities are destabilized. Laws are stretched until they snap. Public trust erodes. And through it all, the administration insists that everything is fine, that chaos is control, that pain is patriotism. The frustration people feel is not partisan fatigue, it is the exhaustion of being governed by people who refuse to govern, who instead manage optics for a man whose emotional volatility dictates the national mood.

The tragedy is not just that Kristi Noem enables this behavior; it is that she exemplifies it. She is what happens when ambition outruns integrity, when politics becomes a loyalty test administered by the most insecure figure in the room. Her administration is not strong. It is brittle. It survives only by constant reassurance, constant lying, constant appeasement of a man who mistakes domination for respect and tantrums for strength.

And that is the core of the anger. Not that these leaders fail, but that they fail deliberately. Not that they lie, but that they expect gratitude for it. They ask the country to absorb dysfunction quietly so that one oversized ego never has to confront accountability. Kristi Noem stands at attention in this arrangement, not as a leader, but as a willing participant in a farce that grows more damaging the longer it continues.

At some point, the performance ends. The cameras move on. The lies collapse under their own weight. What remains will be the record—and the damage—of an administration that chose loyalty over truth, theater over governance, and the fragile emotions of a single man over the actual needs of the people.

How long till 2028?

@Janie

@alvarezjanie

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