Saturday Night Live gave Kristi Noem the send-off she deserved this weekend, mocking the freshly fired Homeland Security Secretary in a cold open that landed somewhere between brutal and cathartic.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (played by Colin Jost) introduced Noem (Ashley Padilla) at a fake Iran war press conference by announcing she had been “reassigned under the bus” by the president.
“I just want to make it clear that I didn’t get fired, I self-deported,” the faux Noem protested.
Trump dumped Noem on Thursday, creating a made-up role called “special envoy for the Shield of the Americas” to soften the blow. He nominated Senator Markwayne Mullin to replace her—just days after Noem’s disastrous Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where she struggled to answer basic questions about her department.
The sketch didn’t let her off easy. When asked about regrets, the fake Noem delivered the night’s most savage line: “I have no regrets. Because, like they say, you miss 100% of the dogs you don’t shoot.”
That’s a reference to the real Noem’s 2024 book, where she proudly revealed that she killed her 14-month-old hunting dog, Cricket, whom she described as “less than worthless.” The admission torpedoed her vice presidential hopes and became the defining fact of her political identity.
SNL kept digging into Noem’s scandal-plagued tenure. “I took this job with the goal of securing our border, deporting thousands of illegals and spending $200 million on ads of me riding a horse,” the sketch version said. “And I think I really nailed it, and by ‘it,’ I mean my married co-worker in a big, beautiful flying bedroom 30,000 feet over Minneapolis.”
That last bit references reports of an alleged affair with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—one of several embarrassments that piled up during Noem’s brief, chaotic stint running DHS.
The real Noem’s “year (singular) of hard work,” as SNL put it, included the $200 million ad campaign featuring herself on horseback, the Lewandowski rumors, and that trainwreck hearing where she couldn’t name domestic terrorist groups operating under her department’s watch.
She lasted about a year in the job.