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Nov 21

Noem daydreaming about her favorite gun. (Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images)

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

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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.

Noem in 2013, before her extreme MAGA makeover.

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.)

The most hilarious thing about this slogan is the (TM), which suggests Kristi was worried some other state might try to steal it.

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.  

Noem flaunting her familiarity with the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl. (Mandel NGAN/ AFP)

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.”

One of these things is not like the other. (Tom Lawrence)

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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POLITICO NIGHTLY: Italy’s recovery summer slips away

 

BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN — Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi checked into a Milan hospital last week after testing positive for Covid. Returning vacationers, like the 83-year-old Berlusconi who spent the summer on the island of Sardinia, have been linked to a resurgence of cases in the country. Italy is now recording more than 1,000 new Covid cases a day, for the first time since May. Still, the country is a long way from the spring, when it was the global Covid epicenter — recording thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths a day. Lockdowns have ended and schools are set to reopen, but the pandemic’s lasting scars remain. Your host checked back in with Silvia Sciorilli-Borrelli, a Milan-based journalist now with the Financial Times, over WhatsApp about how Italians are trying to resume normal life and why she thinks the pandemic has revealed that the country isn’t a place for young people or women. This conversation has been edited. Does fear play a role in how people socialize and travel? Especially after the spring? Yes and no. There’s a large part of the population that is being extra cautious. Old people and teachers, for example. Some of them have asked not to return to school this year for health reasons. Others, including younger people, are behaving normally. The pandemic has become heavily politicized here, too, with some opposition parties saying the virus is no longer lethal and the government’s restrictions are tanking the economy. But cases are rising, right? Silvio Berlusconi’s illness, I think, will change the public’s perception of the current risk and lethality of the virus. It’s ironic his personal doctor, Alberto Zangrillo, was the one going on television to say the virus has mutated and was no longer lethal. He became a symbol for all those who wanted to argue Covid was some kind of invention. And now he’s having to put out statements to update on Berlusconi’s health, and it doesn’t look pretty. How do things look economically? In the U.S., the divide between high- and low-income people has been exacerbated. Definitely that. And also the divide between young and old people. Younger people mainly work on fixed term contracts; many of those were not renewed. Older people have permanent ones and the government put a ban on redundancies until at least November. The younger population is the part that is struggling the most to build careers and become independent from their families. As for women, well, with schools closed how is anyone expected to return to the office if they can’t afford a babysitter? The fact universities and schools have been closed for so long has also put extra pressure on young families and young people. They feel forgotten, not cared for. I think the pandemic is strengthening the idea this isn’t a country for young people or women, really. What about schools? What is the plan for reopening and trying to relieve some of this burden? Schools are reopening next week with very strict guidelines (face masks compulsory, social distancing, desks at least 2m apart, school buses cannot run at capacity, if one pupil is Covid positive the whole class must quarantine), but there’s a lot of uncertainty and mistrust. Both toward the health authorities and toward the govt’s ability to come up with a sensible plan. The govt scrambled in the past couple of weeks when they knew this was coming for the past 6 months. How are businesses responding? I’ve heard that wine windows developed during the Plague are making a comeback. I think businesses and entrepreneurs have proven to be resilient and proactive. Instead of complaints and sitting on their hands they’ve tried their best to bounce back. I’ve been to several restaurants. There’s a form you have to fill out w/ your personal details before you enter in any public venue, so they can track you if someone else tests positive. They all put up plastic shields between tables or moved them outside — menus online with QR codes, staff wearing face masks at all times, customers can take them off only when seated. No more than one family at a time in an elevator. Entrance and exit clearly separated. You’d never imagine Italians to abide by these rules. But they do? Yes. Everywhere. Including Southern Italy. Which is known to be lax on the respect of rules and law. That doesn’t fit the stereotype of an Italian! I should send you a picture from Naples. I had to stand in line outside at a cafe on the highway because there was one other person inside the premises. It was so hot and the lady inside shouted at us to stand in line outside and wear our masks and shut up. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Recently finished Domenico Starnone’s Trick, lovely insight into childhood in Italy. The 4-year old Mario bears a lot of similarities to my toddler. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam. FIRST IN NIGHTLY SLOW WALKING FAST TESTS — The Trump administration’s efforts to scale up rapid coronavirus testing in nursing homes is running into hurdles — just as the White House moves to a new pandemic strategy that stresses shielding the most vulnerable, health care reporter Rachel Roubein writes. Machines that process rapid tests are sitting idle in some nursing homes because of confusion and fears the results are less accurate than widely used lab-based tests. Other nursing homes worry about being able to quickly obtain more of the fast-turnaround tests. And conflicts between state and federal regulations over which tests can be used on nursing home staff are complicating the situation. These problems have emerged even as the Trump administration is pushing with increasing urgency to scale up and speed up testing of nursing home workers. The administration this week mandated regular testing of staff, who can unwittingly carry the virus into the homes. By mid-September, the administration will have sent machines that can do on-the-spot testing to nearly all of the country’s 15,000 nursing homes, completing an effort that began two months earlier. Infections appear to be yet again on the rise in the facilities, which have been linked to more than 51,000 coronavirus deaths, or over a quarter of the nation’s overall death toll. Some nursing homes also said they’re unsure when they’ll be able to buy more supply for rapid tests. It could be weeks, they have been told. FROM THE HEALTH DESK FREEZE IT — AstraZeneca has paused clinical trials of its coronavirus vaccine to review safety data while it investigates a “single event” of illness among a person enrolled in one of its studies, health care reporter Zachary Brennan writes. “This is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials,” the company said in a statement today. “In large trials illnesses will happen by chance but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully. We are working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline.” AstraZeneca did not offer any detail on the “single event,” but STAT reported today that a participant in the company's U.K. trial developed a “suspected serious adverse reaction.” It is not clear whether AstraZeneca or a regulator paused the trial. ASK THE AUDIENCE Is your child heading back to school? If so, Nightly wants to hear from them. Parents and students can send us a short, 1-3 minute voice memo recording to audio@politico.com by Friday, Sept. 11. Please include (1) names, (2) hometown, and (3) the answer to this prompt: Describe the first day of school this year, whether it was remote or in-person. (Anecdotes are encouraged!) Please try to record in a quiet area and hold the phone as if you were talking to someone, but about 1-2 inches from your face. We're accepting submissions from students (and parents of students) from kindergarten through 12th grade. If your student is a minor, parents/guardians, please acknowledge somewhere in the email that you are giving POLITICO permission to use the audio for our podcasts or audio production if we choose to do so. (We can also use the student’s first name only if privacy is a concern.) We’ll use select submissions next week in Nightly. Boaters show their support for President Donald Trump during a parade down the Intracoastal Waterway to just off the shore of Mar-a-Lago on Labor Day in West Palm Beach, Fla. | Getty Images AROUND THE NATION EASY RIDERS, RAGING VIRUS — Almost a fifth of the Covid cases in the U.S. in the last month — or 19 percent of the country’s 1.4 million new cases from Aug. 2 to Sept. 2 — are linked to a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., according to a new report from Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics. The 10-day-long motorcycle rally drew more than 400,000 people to the small city of 7,000 in August, writes Nightly’s Myah Ward. The research team, from several institutions and with support from San Diego State’s Center for Health Economics and Policy Studies, has examined events like Trump’s Tulsa rally and the Black Lives Matter protests that did not lead to an uptick in cases, said Andrew Friedson, a health economist at the University of Colorado Denver and one of the report’s authors. During the Tulsa rally and the George Floyd protests, the potential increase in viral spread was offset by increased social distancing among the people who didn’t attend the rally or the protests, Friedson said. By looking at cellphone data, the researchers found that the number of hours cell phones were inside of homes shot up during these events. But with Sturgis, the opposite happened. Cellphone data showed that activity at restaurants, bars, hotels and shops in South Dakota’s Meade County, where the rally took place, rose by up to 90 percent. And the time people spent at home also declined. In Sturgis, not only were gathering guidelines ignored, Friedson said, but it appears people didn’t wear masks or social distance. After the event, Covid-19 cases rose in Meade County. But it’s not South Dakota that’s facing the biggest costs. “South Dakota reaped some large economic benefits, and the health costs are largely exported,” Friedson said. “Most of the cases that we’re estimating are showing up in places other than South Dakota — the vast majority.” THE GLOBAL FIGHT POWRÓT DO SZKOŁY — Poland was relatively lucky throughout the pandemic. Now it’s embarking on an experiment that has parents and teachers holding their breath — restarting live instruction for all of the country’s 4.5 million school children. Under the new format for the school year, Poland’s education ministry lets schools switch to a hybrid live-virtual system or go fully online only when a coronavirus infection has been confirmed, Wojciech Kość writes. To date, this has happened in just a tiny fraction of schools, according to the ministry. The school year began on Sept. 1, and after a week almost all of the nation’s kindergartens and schools were open, the ministry reported. Only 35 schools had switched to hybrid teaching and 45 had moved online. As for guidance within schools, children are supposed to disinfect hands frequently and keep their distance from each other. There is no requirement to wear masks, although directors have the freedom to impose such a measure for pupils moving inside the building. Education Minister Dariusz Piontkowski insisted that Poland’s approach is similar to that of other European countries, but there are differences. For example, Germany is opening schools on staggered schedules, with kids grouped into small cohorts, an idea that has also taken hold in Norway and Denmark. In Belgium, all students 12 and older must wear masks. France is also imposing a mask rule on children above primary grades. RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT — From Sept. 15, prostitution will be allowed again in the German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, which contain the big cities of Bremen and Hamburg, ending months of forced shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, Laurenz Gehrke writes. In order to track possible infections, however, sex workers will be obliged to keep contact lists and work by appointment, Hamburg’s Social Affairs Minister Melanie Leonhard said today, German media reported. Leonhard added that she believed the move would remove the legal basis for pending lawsuits against the ban on prostitution. Last week, Europe’s largest brothel, in Cologne, filed for bankruptcy after five months of forced closure. COVID-2020 ‘WHATEVER IT TAKES’ — Trump denied today that his campaign was in dire financial straits but pledged he would contribute “whatever it takes” from his personal fortune to ensure the success of his reelection effort. “If I have to, I would,” Trump said of donating to his own campaign. “But we’re doing very well. We needed to spend more money up front because of the pandemic and the statements being made by Democrats, which were, again, disinformation.” NIGHTLY NUMBER 6 The legal limit at which police can disperse people from gathering in the U.K. starting Monday, in response to a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce . The U.K. has seen a swift rise in the daily number of cases since the weekend, with a further 2,420 cases reported today. PARTING WORDS FRESHMEN IN THE FAMILY ROOM — Executive health care editor Joanne Kenen emails us: My son baked big, delicious chocolate cookies the other night. I took care to answer questions (“Mom, do we have vanilla?”) from afar. It is definitely not cool to have your mom in your Zoom frame during Virtual Freshman Orientation community baking hour. Ilan has been home since his overseas gap year was abruptly and painfully terminated in March. He’s not happy about it, but he’s resilient. (Admittedly, I’m biased.) He managed to get a paying summer job doing election-year research for a USC professor. He took two college summer school classes, knocking off his language requirement. But he’s had enough of his childhood bedroom — and the living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and sunporch for that matter. With tangible relief, he began packing for college in August, preparing for his two weeks of New York State-imposed quarantine before moving into his socially-distanced dorm room for his socially-distanced first year. Then, kaboom, the dorms were closed. His classes would all be virtual. He’s back in his room. School began this morning: freshman writing seminar at 8:40 a.m., followed by a poli-sci lecture at 10 a.m. on voting in 2020. Philosophy starts on Wednesday. He’ll be OK. But my heart breaks for him. He had fun making those cookies, and playing Orientation Jeopardy. We live just outside Washington, and a bunch of incoming Columbia first years from the area organized a masked, safe gathering on the National Mall the other night; he came home happier, lighter, than I’d seen him in months. Outgoing and intellectually curious, he is connecting with new online friends as well as can be under these circumstances. But I remember my freshman orientation week with astonishing clarity. Some of the people I met that week are still among those who matter most to me all these many years later. So my wish for my son is that many years from now, he will look back at these terrible times, and say to a dear old friend, “Remember when we met baking cookies over Zoom? They were really good. My mom ate two.” Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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Health officials in 3 states have traced new COVID-19 cases to the Sturgis motorcycle rally where hundreds of thousands of bikers gathered

 

Eric Trump humiliates himself and this country every single day.

A reminder!

[This is part of what's being concealed in Daffy Don's Tax Returns!]

THEHILL.COM

Eric Trump in 2014: 'We have all the funding we need out of Russia'

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/332270-eric-trump-in-2014-we-dont-rely-on-american-banks-we-have-all-the-funding-we?fbclid=IwAR2EiA7FZnerWaDi3pVCP9LHrsTDcP1o0EysUWMmkiiBf0XdUnJnLKjpyK8

Defining American STUPIDITY!

MSN.COM

Health officials in 3 states have traced new COVID-19 cases to the Sturgis motorcycle rally where hundreds of 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/health-officials-in-3-states-have-traced-new-covid-19-cases-to-the-sturgis-motorcycle-rally-where-hundreds-of-thousands-of-bikers-gathered/ar-BB18groa?ocid=sf