Noem's firing shows women are disposable to Trump -- no matter how hard they try to please him

Mar-a-Lago face couldn’t save Kristi Noem
The former DHS secretary's firing shows women are disposable to Trump — no matter how hard they try to please him

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published March 6, 2026 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) Donald Trump went into his second term, according to widespread reporting, with what sources called a “no scalps” policy. No matter how incompetent, politically disastrous or just plain annoying a prominent appointee became, the president would not be firing anyone. The intent was to avoid giving his political opponents the satisfaction, or to make it appear that he had ever experienced an emotion as distasteful as regret. But Trump finally cracked on Thursday and fired one of the most famous members of his Cabinet, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

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But if there was one symbol that resonated the most for Noem’s grasps for power, it was her face. The 54-year-old appears to have undergone such extensive plastic surgery in an attempt to mimic Trump’s cartoonish ideas of what is “hot” in a woman that she is both hard to look at and impossible to match to photos of her younger, normal-looking self. Many women in the president’s orbit have adopted what has become known as “Mar-a-Lago face,” a look that includes heavy fillers, cosmetic procedures and caked-on makeup to be visibly appealing to a man who apparently avoids wearing his glasses in public. When a Vanity Fair profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, was published in December, it became notorious for, among other revelations, a photograph of press secretary Karoline Leavitt that appeared to show extensive injection spots for lip filler. (The president, unbothered by the appearance, keeps openly lusting over Leavitt’s “machine gun lips” that “don’t stop.”) But no one has gotten more attention for her dramatic visual transformation than Noem.



In the end, though, Noem could not save herself, and for reasons that are related to why she likely felt the pressure and need to have plastic surgery that most men in her position don’t reckon with: gender. As a woman, the former secretary was far more disposable to Trump than a man in her position. It’s a lesson she should have learned when he passed her over as a potential running mate for the charisma-free JD Vance. The same president who was found civilly liable by a jury for sexual assault, who calls female reporters “piggy” or scolds them for not smiling, who spent over a decade partying with Jeffrey Epstein will be pleased to have a woman to blame for his administration’s hemorrhaging of public support on what was once his biggest issue, immigration.

It would be one thing if Noem were uniquely incompetent. But as bad as her press coverage has been, it is no worse than what many of the men occupying top spots in the administration are facing. .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/06/mar-a-lago-face-couldnt-save-kristi-noem/