If the Trump administration has made a reality show out of its ICE raids, then Kristi Noem is the Kim Kardashian of the show.
Noem, the U.S. secretary of homeland security and former South Dakota governor, certainly looks the reality-star part: She has spent a good chunk of her time on the job being photographed, a tendency which, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, doesn’t sit well with some ICE officials who think her “desire for publicity interfered with the operations of the agency she is in charge of running.”
Noem’s full glam is always the same ― her long hair blows in the wind, her face is seemingly freshly spray tanned (a requirement for a job in Trumpland) and fully contoured with makeup ― but depending on the day, the ensemble changes.
Sometimes Noem, a onetime contender for President Donald Trump’s VP pick, cosplays firefighter, running fire extinguishing drills with the U.S. Coast Guard. (She’s gone on boat and helicopter patrols alongside them, too.)
The next day, she’s riding ATVs or saddled up on a horseback in a cowboy hat to patrol the border with Customs and Border Protection agents. Still new on the job, occasionally Noem will mishandle a prop; after holding a gun barrel directly at a law enforcement official’s head for a photo, she was hit with criticism from both conservative Megans: Megyn Kelly and Meghan McCain.
It’s costly political theatrics: The WSJ reports that the department has allotted $200 million to air an ad campaign featuring Noem sternly telling immigrants in the country illegally ― in English ― to “leave now.” The ad has cost an estimated $9 million so far, according to data from AdImpact.
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Her most infamous photo shoot to date? Her viral visit last month to a high-security El Salvador prison, which is known for its human rights violations and is currently housing hundreds of deported Venezuelans who the Trump administration says are gang members.
In the clip, Noem uses some of the men as a backdrop to warn other immigrants in the U.S. illegally to leave immediately or potentially face a similar fate. The disempowered men, shirtless and with their heads shaved, stand or sit on rows of beds behind bars, silently listening as she delivers Trump’s message. Meanwhile, Noem sports a tight white shirt, gray slacks, a baseball cap with the ICE logo emblazoned on the front, and what The New York Times has identified as a $50,000 Rolex.
As many noted online, the whole look is a bit “ICE Barbie,” a bit “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” The aesthetic, and the staged ICE bust photo op itself ― is catching on among Trump women: Noem let Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik tag along with her for an ICE raid field trip in Arizona just last week, and Alina Habba, previously the president’s personal lawyer and now U.S. attorney in New Jersey, has also posed for some similar “let’s catch some bad guys” photo ops. Like Noem, Habba has a full face of makeup and what looks to be a fresh blowout in the photos.
If you think there’s something jarring about seeing someone looking so camera-ready and done up as the Trump administration continues to arrest and deport hundreds of migrants ― some of whom reportedly face no criminal charges or have no criminal record ― you’re not alone.
In a Substack essay after Noem’s prison visit went viral, journalist Jeff Sharlet wrote about the unsettling optics of the politician’s Lara Croft-ian look, which he argues inoculates her from critics on the left.
Noem and her stylists — those who’ve arranged both the frightened men in the cell and Noem’s luxurious locks — have made of her a model for Trump women, “sexy & strong”; a thirst trap for rightwing men; and bait for everybody else. That is, an invitation to criticize in the very terms we condemn as sexism. To talk about her look rather than her ideas. “See?” fascists say. “Who’s the sexist now? Hypocrites!”
Women have two aesthetic options in Trump world, and they both center on hotness.
Noem’s aesthetic is one of two options available to women in Trump world: the first, and more well known, is the pencil skirted,“realtor-on-a-billboard” look of Lara Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Noem is performing the other available option, Sharet writes: the strong, sexy badass.
For Trump conservatives, it’s vitally important that their women are perceived as hotter than women on the left, who, in their eyes, look more like the lady in the “triggered feminist” meme than Jennifer Lawrence, who knocked on doors for Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris.
They’re convinced they have “hot” on lockdown now that Trump’s won a second time. The “America Is Hot Again” party thrown at D.C. conservative hotspot Butterworth’s that was recently covered in The Washington Post is proof of that. As one speaker at the event told the youthful crowd, conservatives have an “objectively beautiful lifestyle” and an “objectively superior worldview.”
Of course, objectively beautiful doesn’t mean plastic-surgery-free: As Sharlet writes, generous use of fillers and cosmetic surgery ― “Mar-a-Lago face,” as it’s been labeled ― is part of the strategy rather than a deficiency:
Even as it celebrates body modification — there’s no shame in plastic surgery on the fascist right — it frames itself via a topsy-turvy idea of authenticity. Trump women, goes the thinking, are “real” precisely because they try hard to perform “woman”; liberal and left women are not “real women” because, in this logic, feminism makes them rebel against their “natural” roles. The range of such roles has expanded from those of the 1950s even for fascism women, which is why Noem can comfortably show her power — just so long as she contains it within a still-just-as-narrow spectrum of femininity: “maternal” or “sexy.”
Notably, when Noem entered a town hall meeting to introduce herself to staff of the Department of Homeland Security in January, she came onstage to the Trace Adkins’ song “Hot Mama,” a 2003 country hit with lyrics as corny and sexually suggestive as the title would suggest.
But that hotness can have dark, fascist implications.
Brooks Turner, an artist and educator who studies the aesthetics of fascism, told HuffPost he isn’t surprised by what he’s seeing. Equating motherhood with the project of “real womanhood” is common in fascist regimes.
“In Nazi art and propaganda, for instance, women were usually represented either as young sex symbols, ready to populate the earth with Aryan babies, or as strong, stable mothers, maintaining and when necessary protecting family and homeland,” he said. (The Nazis also targeted trans people for failing to conform to traditional gender norms.)
In the prison video, Turner said Noem synthesizes both of those fascist female archetypes (sexy woman and good mother) while subtly evoking another more mainstream and fresh U.S. cultural archetype: the MILF.
“All of this makes her the perfect aesthetic choice for Head of DHS,” he said.
MILF talk may sound like a stretch, but fascism uses a similar erotic charm to attract and repel people. The ideology is alluring to some because it plays on two taboos: our cultural fetishization of masculinity and power, and our discomfort with authoritarianism and nationalism. As humans, we’re drawn to force and domination. As Vox noted in 2017, it’s the political forbiddenness of fascism in modern times that makes it so erotic ― something scholar Laura Catherine Frost describes in her book “Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism.”
“Images of sexualized fascism derive their meaning precisely from the distance mainstream culture puts between itself and deviation,” Frost wrote. (A magazine editor quoted in a 2000 New York Times article about the rise of “fascist chic” trend at the time put it much more simply: “Fascism — I hate to say it, but it’s sexy,” he said.)
Fascist regimes fixate on visuals in a more general way, too ― their leaders care what a real man looks like, what a real woman looks like, and what a real family looks like (the family unit is the ultimate tool used to promote national unity).
It’s all a facade.
How you look matters immensely to Trump, a former reality star himself who loves to talk of people who look like they were brought in from “central casting. Like his telegenic Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (brought in from Fox News), Noem fits the part, said Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the author of the book “Dressed For Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism.”
According to the aforementioned WSJ report, Noem has a “made for TV” approach to the job, but it’s White House border czar Tom Homan and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller who are reportedly handling the logistical aspects of the president’s mass deportation efforts.
Noem’s recent appearances ― and her flurry of outfit changes to whatever action scene she’s dropped into ― all suggest she wasn’t chosen for this role because of her capabilities or policies, but because of the optics, Rabinovitch-Fox said.
“If her looks were different, there wouldn’t be a point of having her there, as according to the Trump logic, a man could have done the job better,” the professor said.
Putting yourself in a hypermasculine environment — prisons, wearing bulletproof vests in raids ― is one way to wrestle some power for yourself and score some points with the boss, Rabinovitch-Fox said.
“These looks communicate, ‘Even as women they can get the job done,’” she explained.
The casualness of the aesthetic ― Noem looks like a person working from home in athleisure, albeit with great hair ― may also help to indemnify the administration from blowback for the human rights abuses activists say occur in these prisons, Turner said. The blowback increased this week, as Trump was heard telling Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that he’d like to send U.S.-born “homegrown” criminals to Salvadoran prisons, too, if he can figure out a way how. (It’s illegal to expatriate U.S. citizens to a foreign prison for a crime.)
Noem’s look is in solidarity with ICE rather than the suits around her.
“When we see videos of visa-holders getting abducted by ICE, many of the officers are dressed in plain clothes, often in athletic wear, and have very limited identifying government information ― just a hat or a jacket,” he explained.
She’s there with boots on the ground ― very shiny ones ― to show that she’s in the field with the “real” American people, Turner said.
“[Noem] is locking up the ‘fake’ or ‘illegal’ Americans, while the suits, representing the elites, stand back and watch,” Turner said. “It’s populist propaganda, to make the violence of this moment feel casual, everyday. It’s intentional.”
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