James Carville, the “Ragin Cajun” coined the phrase “It’s the Economy Stupid” when he was managing the election campaign for Bill Clinton in 1992. It is meant as an explanation of the one thing voters will base their decisions on when the get ready to pull the lever in the voting booth.
Kristi “Cowgirl” Noem has been fired. For a long time she seemed unassailable as the Head of the Department on Homeland Security. Not the disastrous miss-management of her department, nor the pictures of her in front of caged inmates at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, Where she had sent a number of immigrants brazenly defying a clear court order, nor the excessive force used by her storm troopers in immigration enforcement, nor the killing of two innocent protesters in Minneapolis and the tone-deaf description of the victims as “domestic terrorists” seemed to weaken her standing with Donald Trump and the Republican Senators.
What finally did Kristi Noem in was a simple and straightforward case of corruption. She and her team awarded a USD 220 Millon contract for a propaganda video to a group of private companies with close ties to her and her aides. One of these companies was founded just 11 days prior to the award. The video included ample footage of Kristi Noem, with cowboy hat on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore or other iconic US landmarks. You can view the full video here https://youtu.be/i8r0eFLUKJg
This is not exceptional. We have learned over time that people, including voters and their representatives, have immense tolerance for the failings of their elites. Marital infidelity, crude language and behavior, brutality and even incompetence are usually tolerated to quite a large degree. The one thing that brings the mighty down however, is their corruption. The populace of many East European former communist countries brought down their governments once their people realized the extent of corruption that pervaded these elites. Just think of Ceausescu, Ulbricht and the revolution in Ukraine.
We may see the first steps of this popular revulsion at corruption in the disapproval of US voters of the corruption in the Trump administration as it becomes more obvious. Let’s be clear about this, there is a lot of plain old corruption in this administration. Noem was just the first who suffered the consequences. There is also Border Zar Homan, who was videotaped by the FBI accepting a bribe in cash. There are Trump’s foreign emissaries who combine and intermingle their missions of representing the US government with their private business initiatives. And then there is the boss himself, profiting from his investments in crypto currencies while regulating this market at the same time, extorting cash settlements from networks dependent on FCC approvals and accepting a luxury airplane from Qatar. The plane formally goes to the US Airforce, but when Trump leaves office it goes to him personally.
If the Democrats are looking for lines of attack against the Republicans in the next election, they could do a lot worse than pointing out the deep-seated corruption of the Trump administration and the obvious obsequiousness of the elected Republicans in the House and Senate. The members of the Republican House of representatives and the Republican Senators are complicit in the corruption of Trump and his minions by their tolerance, acceptance and even obfuscation. They are making every effort to pretend that there is no corruption in the Trump administration, fearing that stating the obvious fact that the Trump administration is corrupt would incense the crime boss to the extent of supporting an even more loyal MAGA warrior to confront them in the primaries.