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America: meet your new Secretary of Homeland Security. She’s Trump without the empathy.
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota is best known, of course, as that woman who shot her dog and bragged about it. But that’s far from her most appalling achievement.
Last April, I wrote a TBR Sunday Read for paid subscribers in which I recounted Noem’s manifold horrors. As a public service, I am now making that post free for everyone—and thanks, as always, for supporting my work. —Andy
Noem first won election to Congress in 2010, when the Tea Party ushered in such other luminaries as Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. (Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party’s Senate candidate in Delaware, flamed out amid allegations that she was a practicing witch.) Though not a card-carrying Tea Partier, Noem courted the group’s members, who enjoyed brandishing protest signs featuring Barack Obama with a Hitler moustache.
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During her early years in Congress, Noem seemed like a garden-variety right-winger, but after the 2016 election she heeded the call of opportunism and became an angry drunk karaoke version of Donald J. Trump—much like her partner in toadying, Elise Stefanik. But Noem hasn’t tried to be as sociopathic as her death-cult’s leader—she’s tried to be more sociopathic. And her success demands that we stand back and marvel.
Consider, for example, the two politicians’ speeches at the NRA’s annual meeting last year in Indianapolis. “With me at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, no one will lay a finger on your firearms,” Trump vowed, drawing predictable applause. Noem, by contrast, shared this nugget about her one-year-old grandchild, Addie: “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles, too.” Kristi’s homespun yarn about her granddaughter’s lethal weaponry brought down the house—because, as everyone knows, the only thing that stops a bad one-year-old with a gun is a good one-year-old with a gun.
It's also illuminating to compare Trump’s record in office with Noem’s—specifically, during the pandemic. It was hard to outdo Trump, whose leadership mainly consisted of urging us to ingest bleach, but Kristi managed. In 2020, she scorned the warnings of scientists and invited bikers from across the country to a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. At her beckoning, half a million pathogenic hosts arrived on their thundering hogs. Steve Harwell, whose band Smash Mouth entertained at the superspreader event, whipped up his audience by shouting, “Now we're all here together tonight. And we're being human once again. Fuck that COVID shit.”
Alas, fucking that COVID shit came at a price. “South Dakota took the lead for the worst COVID state in America and the third-worst mortality rate in the entire world,” The New York Times reported. According to a National Institutes of Health study, the post-Sturgis outbreak jacked up health care costs by as much as $8.7 billion. Bizarrely, Noem crowed about her management of the pandemic at the following year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot,” she said, earning a standing ovation. Fauci was probably astonished to discover that there was a Republican politician dumber than Rand Paul. (Of course, the pandemic wasn’t the first time Kristi demonstrated a masterful approach to a public health crisis. In 2019 she unveiled a new anti-drug slogan for South Dakota: “Meth: We’re on it.” Since you might be thinking that I made this up, I am offering visual evidence below.)
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Now let’s explore a playing field where Trump has been the undisputed champion: misogyny. It would be tough to compete with a man who’s been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 25 women and who was found liable for abusing one of them in a department store dressing room. But give Noem credit for effort: While still in Congress, she was one of the few women to vote against the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
As governor, Noem has been a passionate booster of Trump’s assault on women’s reproductive freedom—because, like all people who want toddlers to have firearms, she’s extremely pro-life. But here, too, she’s strived to be even more dystopian than her role model. Not content with South Dakota’s near-total abortion ban—which permits the procedure only to save the life of a pregnant woman—Noem threatened to prosecute pharmacists who sell abortion pills. She called their use “very dangerous medical procedures” and warned that “a woman is five times more likely to end up in an emergency room if they’re utilizing this kind of method for an abortion.” Unfortunately for Kristi, Factcheck.org revealed that she was misquoting statistics from a study that was later discredited and retracted. Like Trump, Noem is a multitasker, managing to be both anti-abortion and anti-fact.
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There is one category of sociopathic achievement, however, where Trump leaves Noem in the dust: the art of the grift. With half a century of fraud under his belt, it would be unreasonable to expect Kristi to have fleeced as many suckers as he has. But she’s off to a promising start.
In March, she posted a five-minute social media video praising a dental practice in Sugar Land, Texas called Smile Texas, which she claimed helped beautify her gubernatorial mouth. The video struck many as weird, not least because, though Noem has helped rid South Dakota of abortion clinics, it still has plenty of dental clinics. Wasn’t it a little fishy that she travelled a thousand miles to have some Texans zhuzh up her teeth? A consumer advocacy group called Travelers United thought so. They sued Noem in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, accusing her of posting an “undisclosed advertisement.” Noem has yet to hawk sneakers or Bibles, but if she’s turning a buck from her public office she’ll feel right at home in a Trump administration.
Still, Kristi must answer the question that faces any budding Trump impersonator: does she have her role model’s talent for spewing hate? Box checked. She’s devoted the first few months of 2024 to spreading vicious claims that South Dakota’s Native Americans are neglecting their children while harboring Mexican drug cartels. Outraged by her comments, all nine of the state’s federally recognized tribes have banned Noem from visiting their reservations. Kristi, who touted South Dakotans’ freedom to move about the state at the height of the pandemic, is no longer free to set foot on twelve percent of the land she governs.
Clearly, she has the fear-mongering credentials required to be in Trump’s Cabinet. But has she done enough to prove her sycophancy? The answer is, “Hell yeah!”
On July 3, 2020, Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that was widely roasted for being racist and divisive. (“Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Is the Closest He’s Come to Fascism” read Foreign Policy’s headline.) Noem seized the chance to do some vigorous ego-stroking, presenting Trump with an extraordinary gift: a replica of Mount Rushmore with his head grafted on. In this mini-monument, Abraham Lincoln appears to be strenuously avoiding eye contact with the host of “The Apprentice.”
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I’d seen a photo of this nutty curio online so I emailed the photographer, Tom Lawrence, for permission to publish it. Tom’s a fourth-generation South Dakotan who’s been a journalist since 1978, and his family farm was just 25 miles from Noem’s. When I asked him to comment on the GOP’s rising star, he responded, “The fact that she is being strongly considered for national office is amazing—and a bit frightening.”
A bit frightening? I wish I had Tom’s talent for understatement. If the Senate confirms her as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem will be the most dangerous person in America. And that includes the one-year-old with the shotgun.
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