‘I Did It for Corey’: Bombshell Book Lays Bare Trump’s Kristi Noem Pick in Knives-Out Cabinet Wars
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Loyalists raged when President-elect Donald Trump handed “obviously unqualified” Kristi Noem the Homeland Security cabinet role as a favor in one of countless knives-out battles that reportedly defined a chaotic transition process, a bombshell new book claims.
Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America, an upcoming expose by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, captures a gladiatorial swirl of loyalty tests and backstabbing that shaped Trump’s earliest cabinet decisions.
However, Noem’s surprise nomination, Karl writes, was made not for competence but reportedly as a favor to a man she has denied having a long-rumored affair with.
According to details published by The Guardian, Karl reports that Noem wasn’t even on the transition team’s list.
Karl writes: “When a surprised Trump adviser asked the president-elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer. ‘I did it for Corey,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.’”
The “Corey” in question, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was a longtime Trump loyalist. The appointment, however, enraged other figures in Trumpworld.
Speaking to Karl for the book, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon shredded Noem’s nomination as a national security risk.
“We still got the global war on terror. She runs the whole thing? She runs the f*cking Secret Service? It’s all of it. It’s the global war on terror. It’s all that. What are you talking about? She’s never been in law enforcement!” Bannon told Karl.
Karl added: “He blamed Lewandowski for convincing the president-elect to do it. ‘This motherf*cker asked for somebody who’s obviously unqualified – and it’s dangerous. This is dangerous. What are you doing?'”
Elsewhere, Howard Lutnick, the billionaire who would become Commerce Secretary, ran Trump’s cabinet search in Mar-a-Lago like a casting call, according to Retribution.
Karl writes that the billionaire financier “had a conference table installed in the Tea Room, as well as several large television screens that he used for presentations to Trump about potential nominees.”
He continues: “One monitor would display bullet points – no more than five – describing a candidate’s qualifications, while a second screen would be loaded up with video clips of his or her recent TV appearances. A third monitor would feature a large photograph of the candidate – a headshot – so that Trump could visualize whether he or she looked the part; whether they were, in Trump’s mind, out of ‘central casting.'”
The backroom skirmishes became routine. Lutnick pushed for a former Uber executive to run Transportation, only to find Trump leaning toward Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host. Determined to sink him, Lutnick then reportedly tried to kneecap Duffy’s bid by ordering aides to trawl through years of TV footage for anti-Trump soundbites.
According to Karl they found one, from 2015, that almost derailed him: “Lutnick’s team had to go back nearly a decade – to the early days of the 2016 Republican presidential primary – to find anything Duffy had said that was remotely negative about Donald Trump. He finally found a September 2015 interview in which the then congressman had said he didn’t believe Trump was a real conservative and didn’t think he would win the party’s nomination.”
As Trump began to reconsider, he walked back after a direct phone call with Duffy and his wife, Karl reports.
“They were able to convince the president-elect that Sean had long since changed his views on Trump’s conservative bona fides,” he adds, with the president announcing the nomination in November.
The chaos didn’t stop there. In further excerpts published by ABC News on Thursday, Karl explains that when word spread that Susie Wiles was meeting with Trump two days after the election to be offered White House chief of staff, rivals Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins reportedly sprinted to Florida to block the move.
Wiles’ aides stalled them, Karl reports, even allegedly roping in Vice President-elect JD Vance to keep Trump occupied until the offer was sealed. The pair arrived too late, and McMahon and Rollins were later handed the Education and Agriculture posts, respectively, instead.
