DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her de facto Chief of Staff Corey Lewandowski tried to throw Stephen Miller under the bus. It isn’t working.
The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents has thrown the Department of Homeland Security into disarray. Agents initially claimed Pretti planned to “massacre” them, but evidence later showed his firearm had been removed before the incident. This second deadly encounter in the city—following the killing of Renee Good earlier—has fueled protests and forced President Trump to intervene directly in operations.
Trump announced that border czar Tom Homan would take control of the Minnesota crackdown, reporting straight to him. “Tom is tough but fair,” Trump stated. This move bypassed Noem and Lewandowski, signaling a clear shift in authority amid accusations of mishandled tactics like chemical agents and helicopter rappels into buildings.
Lewandowski, a holdover from Trump’s 2016 campaign, has operated as Noem’s top advisor under a “special government employee” designation that skirts financial disclosure rules. Insiders describe him as a persistent figure—”like a cockroach; he just never goes away and always survives”—but one whose judgment has drawn fire.
He allegedly orchestrated leaks blaming White House deputy chief of staff Miller for the botched messaging around Pretti’s death and pushed a story about Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe in a 2024 FBI sting, which the White House dismissed as false. A DHS official said of Lewandowski: “He makes bad decisions, and he always wants to be with Kristi. That is going to be her downfall.”
Recent reports suggest Lewandowski’s influence is waning fast. Overheard at Reagan National Airport discussing DHS contracts, including with Palantir Technologies, he has raised eyebrows about potential conflicts. His aggressive push for sweeps in Democrat-led cities has backfired, and with Trump sidelining him from Minneapolis, sources predict he’s “out the door” soon. This comes as questions mount about whether he’s exceeded the legal limits of his temporary role.
In contrast, Miller emerges unscathed. As the driving force behind Trump’s hardline immigration policies, Miller has driven daily calls demanding more arrests and deportations. Though Noem tried to pin the “assassin” label on Pretti to him—saying, “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the President and Stephen”—Miller retains Trump’s full backing. The White House affirms he “remains in his position as the architect of Trump’s immigration policy.”
His absence from a two-hour Oval Office meeting with Noem, Lewandowski, and others like Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt only underscores his independent clout. Allies see this as Trump rewarding loyalty over drama.
Noem herself faces scrutiny but appears secure for now. After initially defending the agents and shifting blame, she met with Trump amid calls for her resignation from both sides of the aisle. Trump rebuffed those demands, declaring she has “done a very good job” and suggesting critics target her “because she is a woman.”
Speculation swirls about a soft exit—perhaps a Senate run in South Dakota or a 2028 presidential bid—but no immediate ouster is planned. Prediction markets put her odds of leaving by year’s end at around 43%, though that’s amid broader Cabinet churn.
This infighting plays out against a backdrop of relentless leaks to outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic, which paint the administration as fractured. Some suspect these stories stem from holdovers in the bureaucracy eager to sabotage Trump’s mandate to secure the border and deport criminals. After all, the Electoral College math favors Republicans as red states gain ground, and removing illegal immigrants from the equation only strengthens that edge. Yet the real stakes are American lives: unchecked migration has drained resources, with Trump threatening Rep. Ilhan Omar over alleged stolen funds exceeding $19 billion.
Homan’s arrival in Minneapolis promises a “draw down” if locals cooperate, a pragmatic pivot from the initial heavy hand. Border Patrol Commissioner Rodney Scott backs him, criticizing rivalries that have undermined unity. As Trump shakes up the team—demoting figures like Greg Bovino back to California—the focus returns to results: protecting citizens, enforcing laws, and fulfilling the promise to make America safe again.
In the end, these adjustments reflect Trump’s hands-on style, weeding out weaknesses to deliver on his agenda. With Miller at the helm of policy and distractions like Lewandowski fading, the path forward looks clearer. But the media’s glee over every rift raises a question: who’s really rooting against secure borders?
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
