The President fires the DHS Secretary on social media and names a senator to replace her.

The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, after two days of testimony on Capitol Hill in which she was, by the bipartisan accounts of senators present, repeatedly unable to answer questions about the conduct of her department, was, on Thursday afternoon, removed from her post by the President of the United States in a Truth Social post.

The post identified the new role for the outgoing Secretary as Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a security initiative the administration had announced earlier in the week. The post identified the new Secretary as Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, whose nomination would be sent to the Senate, with confirmation expected to be completed by March 31.

The chronology, by the standard of these announcements, is the part to mark. The Secretary’s Senate testimony had ended on Wednesday afternoon. The President’s post was on Thursday afternoon. The replacement title for the outgoing Secretary, “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas,” appears, by the documentary record, to have been drafted before the testimony began. The Shield of the Americas summit, at which the title would presumably have been deployed, was already scheduled for the following Saturday, in Doral.

The matter that produced the Senate testimony was, in the day’s reporting, several. Among them: the deaths of two American citizens shot by federal agents during immigration raids in Minneapolis in January; a $220 million border-security advertising contract; the dismantling of FEMA; the issuance, on Secretary Noem’s personal authority, of a policy that required her individual signoff for any departmental spending request over $100,000. The Senate’s questioning had been bipartisan. Senator Rand Paul, asked Wednesday about the Secretary, said she had “anger issues.”

The replacement, Senator Mullin, is on the public record a former mixed martial arts fighter and the owner of an Oklahoma plumbing-and-utility-services company. He has, in his time in the Senate, been one of the President’s more vocal supporters. If confirmed, he would be the first member of a federally recognized tribe to lead the Department of Homeland Security. The Senate’s questions for him at his confirmation hearing, two weeks later, will return to many of the same matters that produced his predecessor’s removal.

The departure is, on the formal record, the first Cabinet departure of the second term. The President, asked Thursday evening about the change, told reporters, “She did a great job. She’s now going to do an even better job.” The “even better job” is, by the official record, the role created in the same Truth Social post.

A serious country, in a serious moment, would acknowledge that a Cabinet officer was being removed because the testimony had become untenable. A less serious country would do what is being done: announce a promotion in the same sentence that announces the dismissal, and trust the press not to do the math.

Calmly documenting the decline.