Kristi Noem may have learned of her firing from Truth Social: report

It's unclear how now former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem discovered she was fired, and reports Thursday indicate she could have found out about it on Truth Social.

CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Noem was speaking at the Sergeant Benevolent Association Major Cities Conference in Nashville just as President Donald Trump had announced via his Truth Social platform that he would replace her with MAGA ally and former MMA fighter Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and demote her to "Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas." A White House official said she was apparently aware as she was speaking that she had lost her position.

"Now I do not know the order of events in terms of whether or not she learned before or he actually posted this, or during the time that he was posting this, that I'm still trying to get to the bottom of," Holmes said. "But she is aware that he has put this out there now, the other thing to note here is that she's been asked a number of questions, and nobody has asked her about it, so clearly there's probably several people in that audience who don't know that this announcement just happened roughly an hour ago or less."

Trump had previously been reluctant to replace any of his Cabinet members ahead of midterms, Holmes reported.

"They didn't want that to be a distraction from their midterm messaging," she said. "Obviously again, showing just how angry and basically done with Kristi Noem, President Trump had decided he was the other part of this that has been such a fascinating part to watch, was the idea that in the aftermath of Minnesota and the aftermath of the shootings in Minneapolis, when Kristi Noem was being moved out of the state and out of that program, and Tom Homan was being brought in there were a number of calls for her impeachment largely from Democrats and the White House. At that point, officials inside telling me that President Trump was likely to react the opposite to those calls. And instead of going along with this, that he was going to become more defiant in protecting Kristi Noem. And certainly we heard him talking in private and publicly talking about how well that Kristi Noem had done at the border."

But that changed this week.

"We have seen now that President Trump has actually fired a member of his Cabinet the first time in this second term," Holmes said. "Clearly bucking any idea that it was too tumultuous to do so ahead of the midterms and instead replacing Kristi Noem with this staunch trump ally, the senator from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, who has been a real advocate for President Trump both when he talks to reporters on Capitol Hill and on the TV circuit, constantly defending the president so, again, we're still learning the details and the sequence of events here, but it is clear that President Trump had grown increasingly irate, particularly since that Senate Judiciary hearing and the conversations that he was having with lawmakers, Republican lawmakers we're not giving him pause in any way to change his mind."

Instead of standing by Noem, Trump made a different move.

"You know he wasn't getting a lot of pushback from the lawmakers when he was saying that he was considering firing her," Holmes said. "And instead, I was told that there were a number of names floating around in various conversations. You had lawmakers proposing people that they liked for this job."