An Alleged Affair in the Trump Administration Says It All About What’s Happening in Washington

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For the past six months, Corey Lewandowski has occupied a, shall we say, nontraditional role at the Department of Homeland Security.

The longtime Donald Trump ally and early-2016 campaign manager is not officially on the DHS roster, nor does he draw a DHS salary. But Trump administration officials and DHS staff have told reporters that he is performing the functions of Secretary Kristi Noem’s chief of staff, while the actual chief of staff position has not been filled. He has accompanied Noem on trips to confer with foreign leaders in Israel, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico. Often, he is the only one by her side at meetings. According to CNN, he approved billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency grants to be funneled to Republican-led states, demanded that personnel take polygraph tests after a leak to the press, ordered the firing of government workers, and asked that others be placed on leave for infractions such as using gender pronouns in an email.

Like Elon Musk once was, Lewandowski is categorized as a “special government employee,” a designation that allows him to maintain his outside work and investments while working up to 130 unpaid days in a year for the federal government. The role has historically been used for advisers with specific areas of expertise who were not intimately involved in decisions about funding and personnel, which kept a lid on corruption, since special government employees don’t have to disclose their financial interests or outside clients. (CNN reported this week that, according to DHS, Lewandowski has filed a financial disclosure, but the department has not made it public.)

According to a DHS spokesperson, Lewandowski took on the role with a personal sense of mission “as the husband of a 9/11 widow.” Lewandowski calls himself “a volunteer,” like he’s washing towels at an animal shelter.

That the de facto No. 2 at DHS is an unpaid, unofficial dude with potential conflicts of interest and a history of drawing physical and sexual abuse allegations would be troubling enough on its own. But there’s another layer to this story. For years, sources have been telling reporters that Lewandowski and Noem are dating, though they’re each married to other people. In 2021, Noem tweeted that claims of an affair published on conservative website American Greatness were “total garbage and a disgusting lie.” She went on, “old, tired attacks on conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can’t achieve anything without a man’s help.” When the Daily Mail and the New York Post published similar allegations in 2023, Noem’s spokesman called it “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.” Lewandowski denied the affair this year in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “This Department doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip—we are focused on keeping the American homeland and its citizens safe,” Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary at the DHS’ office of public affairs, wrote in response to Slate’s request for comment.

But rumors of their alleged affair have followed the two since 2019, when they started appearing on the GOP event circuit together. I have no new evidence that they are indeed an item, but sources who’ve seen them together at Republican events have been saying this for a long time. It’s intensely, morbidly amusing to imagine. So why don’t we imagine it?

Let’s run through the reports. Noem and Lewandowski began arousing suspicion when they began appearing together at GOP events across the country, sometimes arriving on donors’ private planes and looking awfully cozy with one another. Observers allegedly witnessed their flirtations against some of the least sexy backdrops known to American life: conferences for conservatives, gatherings of Republican officials, candidate fundraising dinners. Now, they spend their time together touring immigrant surveillance facilities and playing SWAT dress-up in armored military vehicles.

For the average paramour, this would be a disappointing landscape for the pursuit of passion. But it does not require a protracted stretch of the imagination to envision the settings of right-wing hobnobbing and anti-immigrant law enforcement as fruitful grounds for a MAGA-world kink. If you’re drawn to the project of lawlessly abducting brown people and sending them to barbaric prisons as a show of force and white dominance, doing it alongside an object of love or lust might offer a special kind of gratification.

The two supposed lovebirds haven’t been doing much to quell all the rumors over the years. One source told the New York Post that their handsiness at a hotel bar during the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 was “absurdly blatant and public,” with more than 100 other conferencegoers in the room. Two other Post sources said they saw Noem sitting on Lewandowski’s lap at an event at Mar-a-Lago in 2020. In interviews with the Daily Mail, two former Noem staffers said that, in 2022, they were instructed to keep the then–South Dakota governor’s schedule private from her husband in an effort to hide the scope of her relationship with Lewandowski.

Several people who have spoken to the press call the relationship an open secret in Trump circles. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported, the alleged romance made Trump and his advisers balk at the idea of Lewandowski taking on an official role as Noem’s chief of staff, which led to him serving in his current gray-area position.

It wasn’t the first time the alleged affair affected their career prospects. When Trump was looking for a running mate in 2024, Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt wrote in his book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, Trump’s aides believed that if Noem was selected, “her relationship with Lewandowski would become one hell of a distraction.” (It’s kind of a comforting throwback to a time when Republicans cared about heterosexual morality.) At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Isenstadt reported, Lewandowski told people that his wife and Noem were staying at the same hotel, on the same floor, in two different rooms—seemingly implying that it made it easier for him to see them both.

The logistics of their meetups may have gotten easier this year once they both started working in D.C. As reported by the Daily Mail in April, Noem and Lewandowski rented apartments in buildings right across the street from one another in a pricey D.C. neighborhood. Lewandowski was photographed coming and going from Noem’s building, one time with a duffel bag, and a neighbor said the two were often spotted in the elevator and common areas. Citing an increase in threats since the Daily Mail exposed the location of her residence, Noem has since decamped to taxpayer-funded housing on a local waterfront military base. Lewandowski reportedly continues to visit her there.

Now, it wouldn’t be outlandish for a pseudo–chief of staff to do some off-hours work in the boss’s apartment. But whether or not the affair rumors are true, it’s a remarkably shameless way to behave for two people who have been dogged by accusations of sleeping together for years. The sexual tension building up while ironing out concentration camp logistics must be undeniable!

In a way, the Noem-Lewandowski situation is a perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration’s ethos. It’s potentially doubly corrupt, if Noem brought in her alleged lover to work under her in a manner that abuses the “special government employee” designation. Breaches of government norms, nepotism, sexual impropriety, ethical violations, doing shady things in plain sight—it’s all part of the MAGA package. Perhaps the only surprising part, if the reports are true, is that the alleged romance has lasted this long. Half a decade would be a lifetime in affair years, especially in the backstabbing crucible of Trump’s inner orbit. Love wins!

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