We may be in the midst of an expanding and unconstitutional war, and the president may just have fired the disgraced cabinet secretary who’s been overseeing his key domestic policy plank, but hey: At least the economic numbers stink too. The United States lost 92,000 jobs in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning, while the unemployment rate ticked back up to 4.4 percent. VL and Catherine Rampell will go live later today to discuss around 12:30 p.m. EST.

Programming note: There’s a very special Triad newsletter from JVL coming later today. We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but make sure you check it out. Exciting news—that’s all we’ll say for now. 👀

Happy Friday.

Kristi’s Unforgivable Sin

by Andrew Egger

Over the past year, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has overseen many, many atrocities and told many, many lies on Donald Trump’s behalf. Ironically, however, the statement that made him mad enough to fire her seems like it might have been the truth.

Across two days of bruising testimony this week, Noem faced a gauntlet of pointed critiques from House and Senate Democrats—but it was a particular line of questioning from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) that sealed Noem’s fate. “The president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently?” Kennedy asked.

“The president tasked me with getting the message out to the country and to other countries where we were seeing the invasion come from, with putting commercials out,” Noem said. “That has been extremely effective.”

If it was a lie, it’s one she’s been telling for a while. Thirteen months ago, speaking at CPAC and fresh on the job, Noem enthusiastically related a conversation she said she’d just had with the president: “Those beautiful ads you did about South Dakota. . . . I want you to do those for the border,” she said Trump had told her. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.” Seems plausible!

That’s not how Trump remembers it, though, at least not anymore: “I never knew anything about it,” he told Reuters yesterday.

In his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with a team of remarkably sycophantic and rubber-spined people; it’s amusing to note how even these people have learned how to play him. Noem had made many enemies for herself in the White House, both by her heavy-handed personnel management at DHS and by her catastrophic-in-hindsight attempts to blame Stephen Miller for her failures in Minneapolis (again: It’s true, but she shouldn’t have said it!). From beginning to end, the Kennedy play appears to have been an attempt by these enemies to lead the president like a toddler by the hand to the conclusion that Noem had to go. She’s trying to blame you for her mistakes, Mr. President!¹ She could survive the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, since Trump didn’t care much about those. This, though, hit close to his heart.

Still: All’s well that ends well, and everyone can and should cheer Noem’s ouster. In a cabinet full of lunatics and lickspittles, Noem still managed consistently to distinguish herself by her cruelty, her stupidity, her paranoia, her pathological dishonesty, and her self-aggrandizement. She made a mockery of her department’s organizational structure by running her ship through the outside adviser she was allegedly boinking, the ur-psycho Trump ally Corey Lewandowski. Her consistent focus was on using her perch both to build her personal brand and to feed the online right’s bloodlust for scenes of violence against immigrants and protesters alike. (For a good rundown of the lowlights of her tenure, go read the great article our Adrian Carrasquillo wrote for the site yesterday.)

Trump’s pick to replace her, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, is a MAGA meathead of the highest order, but I’d hesitate to predict confidently that he’ll be any worse—at any rate, he’ll have his work cut out for him if he hopes to be. And this isn’t nothing: We hope we won’t have to think about Corey Lewandowski’s sex life ever again.

Presumably, Democrats will mostly oppose Mullin’s nomination; presumably, he will be confirmed on a largely party-line vote regardless. But Senate Democrats should keep their eye on the ball here: For the moment, who’s running DHS should matter to them a lot less than what institutional controls they can impose on it before turning the money spigot back on. We don’t yet fully know what a Mullin-led DHS might look like. But we know it’ll look a lot better if ICE and Border Patrol officers are wearing uniforms and badges than if they’re not.

“Comfortable with the Use of Force”

by Mark Hertling

It’s not exactly breaking news that President Donald Trump has ordered the military into combat more often in his second term than in his first. “Though he was critical of other presidents’ foreign entanglements on the campaign trail,” says a report from the Council on Foreign Relations, “President Donald Trump has demonstrated a willingness to use U.S. military force in his second term.”

Greg Jaffe at the New York Times agrees: “One year into his second term, Mr. Trump seems to have shed his earlier skepticism and turned repeatedly to the U.S. military as a low-cost, high-payoff means of solving problems that have bedeviled American presidents for decades.”

But it was the phrasing of Times White House correspondent Peter Baker that struck me. “Trump,” he wrote, “is far more comfortable using the instruments of power than he was the last time around, at home as well as abroad.” Baker repeated this on Morning Joe yesterday morning: “He is more comfortable w