Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.<\/p>\n
You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of Wuthering Heights<\/a>. But for radioactive romance, you can\u2019t beat Washington.<\/p>\n Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.<\/p>\n With Maga\u2019s version of Wuthering Heights, the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalising the capital as they\u2019ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski\u2019s credit, he didn\u2019t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That\u2019s Noem\u2019s department.)<\/p>\n Holiday Barbie, as Robbie\u2019s Cathy has been dubbed for her ostentatious dresses and hairstyles, pales in comparison with the costumes and Rapunzel extensions of Ice Barbie. Imprisoned in her marriage to Edgar Linton, Robbie\u2019s Cathy gleams in elaborate gowns and necklaces. But Noem topped that. When she went to see migrants in prison in El Salvador, she sported a baseball cap with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> (Ice) logo \u2013 and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona worth $50,000.<\/p>\n Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there\u2019s a dog Noem won\u2019t put down.)<\/p>\n President Donald Trump<\/a> had rejected the plea of Lewandowski \u2013 who managed Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign until he got fired after dust-ups with the Trump family and others \u2013 to be Noem\u2019s chief of staff because Trump was disturbed \u201cby the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved\u201d, as the Atlantic\u2019s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer put it. (Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married with children, have denied the affair.)<\/p>\n Noem slid Lewandowski into the Department of Homeland Security as a temporary special government employee and made him her powerful aide-de-camp. He has stayed long beyond his allotted 130 days, thanks to scheming workarounds. For a time Trump let it ride, even though, according to the New York Post, he cringed when he saw them flagrantly taking sips from the same can of soda \u2013 an unmistakable tell.<\/p>\n An Atlantic story called Lewandowski and Noem \u201cthe First Couple of a Dysfunctional DHS\u201d. As Noem\u2019s enforcer and promoter, Lewandowski had a hand in every decision.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Trump climbdown on Alex Pretti killing catches Homeland Security chief and Maga off guardOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n An upcoming book by NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley reveals that senior officials held a secret meeting in 2025 after Trump was sworn in to discuss what they saw as the toxic romance warping \u2013 or wuthering \u2013 the agency\u2019s plans as it embarked on the barbaric round-up of immigrants in the country illegally. The rough manhunt drained the department of compassion as it attempted to build up Noem and capture headlines. Lewandowski tried to think of ways to redeem Noem after she disgustingly called Renee Good and Alex Pretti, victims of her Ice run amok, domestic terrorists.<\/p>\n Like Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Noem was aspirational, always trying to move up. Cathy traded up to the big house nearby; Kristi commandeered the coast guard commandant\u2019s waterfront residence. But her tactics were too flashy and narcissistic even for Trump. She and Lewandowski jetted around in a luxury 737 Max, the Wall Street Journal reported, and once high-handedly tried to dismiss their coast guard pilot when he failed to transfer her blanket to a different plane. They had to get him back once they realised there was no one to fly them home. (Other accounts say it was her bag that was left. But what was in that bag that could cause such a ruckus?)<\/p>\n Axios reported that Noem had planned to use border funds for an almost $300 million luxury jet fleet for DHS.<\/p>\n It was the end for Noem when she was questioned at her hearing on Tuesday by Louisiana senator John Kennedy about spending $220 million on glossy commercials, including one where she wore a cowboy hat and rode a horse near Mount Rushmore.<\/p>\n She should have known better than to hog attention from the president, the biggest attention hog of all time.<\/p>\n A sceptical Kennedy pressed Noem about whether Trump had signed off on the ads, and she said that he had. The senator reported that the president called him afterward \u201cmad as a momma wasp\u201d, denying he knew about the ads. At that moment, Kennedy said, \u201cshe was dead as fried chicken\u201d.<\/p>\n Now Democrats are investigating whether Noem and Lewandowski gamed the system on the ad contract, which looks politically incestuous, so that they and their allies financially benefited. They\u2019re also looking into whether she perjured herself.<\/p>\n