Kristi Noem in lost blanket tantrum, fires her pilot, forced to rehire him as couldn’t fly plane without him

Whisper it, but I’m starting to think there are signs that Kristi Noem might… not be playing with a full deck. From a certain perspective, Donald Trump did something right when he tapped her to run the Department of Homeland Security.

After all, if you want to ethnically cleanse the United States, you kinda need someone with no morals, no empathy, and who’s so stupid she doesn’t realize she’s being set up as a fall guy.

But when you hire a dangerously unstable lunatic, you have to deal with them doing dangerously unstable lunatic things. And perhaps that hasn’t been better illustrated than in this bizarre anecdote from The Wall Street Journal.

They report that during a trip Noem was required to change planes at short notice due to a maintenance issue. As she did, she accidentally left her special blanket on the first plane. When she realized her blanky was missing, she went ballistic and fired the Coast Guard pilot assigned to transport her.

The Coast Guard pilot who left Noem’s blanket behind was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination

They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home https://t.co/xk1oaF5MVO

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) February 13, 2026

Look, Noem needs her blanky, okay?

The unnamed pilot was apparently told to take a commercial flight home, with the loss of his job (and being stranded in the middle of nowhere) seemingly deemed an appropriate punishment for being vaguely present at the same time a 54-year-old woman forgot her own blanket.

Then, presumably, as this unlucky pilot was trudging towards the booking desk to spend their savings on a last-minute flight home (probably also figuring out how to break this sad news to their partner), Noem’s team realized that without a pilot, there was nobody to fly the plane.

Uh-huh, real bunch of Einsteins we got here. And so, they ordered the pilot to come back, quietly explained the whole “you’re fired!” thing might have been a mistake, and reinstated him.

The story sounds too ludicrous to be true, but The Wall Street Journal insists they’ve heard it from multiple credible sources. We can only wonder what’s so special about Noem’s blanket that a pilot can be fired over it, a pilot who – we can only underline – played zero role in Noem forgetting it when she switched planes.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that maybe just let Noem fly on planes with maintenance problems in the future. Sure, she may end up plummeting to earth in a rapidly depressurizing metal tube, but at least she’ll have her blanky for comfort.