After Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem in limelight as Trump 2.0 team does it again

Very few US presidential terms in the first three months have been as tumultuous, chaotic and comical as that of Donald Trump’s second innings as the American President ever since his swearing-in on January 20. It would have been extra funny if not for the tacit US support offered to state-sponsored blood spills across quite a few geographies.

 

The US Secret Service went into a tizzy this weekend after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reported that her Gucci shoulder bag with US$3,000 cash, the all-important access cards, bank cards, passport, blank cheques, prescription medication, driving licence and a Louis Vuitton Clemence wallet, was stolen right under her nose when she was having dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant on Sunday.

 

CCTV footage showed a person sitting next to Noem’s table picking up her bag.

 

The Homeland Security chief, responsible for public security in the US, being subjected to an embarrassing theft follows the leakage of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ‘top-secret’ messages on the Signal messaging platform.

 

The leak of the conversation regarding airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen happened after a journalist was ‘accidentally’ included in the group chat among White House officials, which amounts to a huge security breach that could have endangered the lives of US pilots involved in the attacks on Houthi leaders.

 

To make matters worse, there were reports of a second Signal chat security breach on Monday when Hegseth reportedly shared details of a US attack on Yemeni Houthi rebels in a group chat that included his wife, his brother and several other people.

 

After his swearing-in, Trump as President signed an unprecedented number of executive orders that included pulling out the US from WHO, a clampdown on illegal immigrants, doing away with citizenship by birth, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’ and doing away with diversity programmes, rescinding 78 orders of the previous Joe Biden-led government.

 

This is in sharp contrast to his signing of just five executive orders in 2017 after assuming his first-term presidency. 

World