The Homeland Security nomination is the latest leap in a life of risks for Kristi Noem • North Dakota Monitor

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s advancement to the confirmation spot as a Trump cabinet secretary likely surprised some people who thought her career ended nine months ago with a notoriously disastrous book publishing.

It’s no surprise to Noem, who has thwarted predictions of her death since her first nationwide race 15 years ago.

The biggest story in that campaign was one revelation of 20 speeding tickets on her driving record. It proved to be the first of many scandals, controversies and negative headlines that Noem would overcome on his rise to national prominence.

Noem vows to secure border as DHS chief, will shut down mobile app for migrants

Follow two hours of questioning Friday before a US Senate committee hearingeverything that stands between Noem and her appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security is a vote of the full Senate. It is expected sometime shortly after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

Noem will then step down as South Dakota’s governor and head to Washington, DC, to lead an agency that oversees two of the most important issues for Trump and his millions of supporters: border security and immigration enforcement.

It’s a high-risk appointment that could end in failure or serve as a launching pad for a Republican presidential primary in 2028, when Trump will be unable to seek office again because of term limits.

In other words, it’s the kind of leap that 53-year-old Noem has taken ever since a family tragedy sparked her interest in politics more than three decades ago.

“All my life,” said Noem in her infamous book last year “is about taking risks.”

Defined by death and taxes

Noem inherited much of his risk-taking personality from his late father, Ron Arnold, a lifelong farmer and rancher. She remembers him as a hard-charging man of action, like a John Wayne movie character come to life.

“Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be just like him,” she wrote in her earlier book, “Not my first Rodeo.”

One day in 1994, Arnold climbed to the top of a grain bin to break open a moldy crust on top of the grain. An unseen cavity under the crust gave way and he was sucked under several tons of corn. He suffocated while rescuers made frantic efforts to save him.

As Noem’s family grieved, they were faced with a federal estate tax bill of about $170,000 on her father’s $2 million estate. A large part of the estate’s value was tied up in land, cattle, stored grain and equipment, as well as loan debt, which made it difficult for the family to pay the bill.

Tax experts said Arnold could have avoided this outcome with a properly structured will. Noem called it “fake news” in 2017, tells a Courthouse News reporter“For a decade after a tragic farming accident took my father’s life, the death tax affected almost every decision our family made.”

Noem’s anger over the property tax eventually motivated her to enter politics. She won a seat in the state House of Representatives in 2006 and served from 2007 to 2010.

That year, she entered a crowded Republican US House seat and won the primary. She went on to beat incumbent Democratic U.S. Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin by 2 percentage points in the general election, overcoming the revelation of the speeding tickets along the way.

In Congress, Noem voted for legislation to weaken the estate tax, including the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed during Trump’s first term in 2017. Among the law’s provisions is a doubled estate tax exemption, allowing individual estates worth up to 13.99 million dollars can now avoid the tax. The law is scheduled to expire at the end of this year, but Trump and congressional Republicans hope to extend it.

Noem said she was “instrumental” in crafting the 2017 legislation. The impact on her political stature was evident in a photo of a White House event celebrating the bill’s passage. Among dozens of members of Congress who stood behind Trump, she scored a prime spot near the center of the frame, over the shoulders of the vice president and Senate majority leader.

To the congress and back

After four terms in the U.S. House, Noem turned his attention back to South Dakota in 2018, when the state’s then-governor was term-limited. Noem’s husband, Bryon, and her three children had remained in South Dakota throughout her time in Congress, flying back and forth frequently and slept on a pull-out bed in her congressional office.

“When Bryon and the kids were in town, we’d blow up air mattresses and throw down comforters and basically have slumber parties as a family,” Noem wrote in her first book.

She defeated South Dakota’s attorney general in a Republican gubernatorial primary and then drew Trump to the state for one collection in the autumn. That helped her to a three-point victory in the election over Democratic lawmaker Billie Sutton, a popular former rodeo cowboy.

Noem took office in January 2019 as South Dakota’s first female governor. A little more than a year into her first term, South Dakota detected its first cases of COVID-19.

Noem often says as she did last week in her State of the State speechthat South Dakota was “the only state that never forced a business or church to close.” The simple description obscures a complicated reality.

In the early weeks of the pandemic, Noem advised South Dakota schools closed for the remainder of the 2020 school year, and they complied.

Beyond that, her early approach to pandemic restrictions was ambiguous. In March 2020, she issued a announcement lists 20 things South Dakotans “should” do: People “should” engage in social distancing, businesses “should” prevent customers from congregating close together, health facilities “should” postpone elective surgeries, and so on.

Journalists asked Noem to explain whether she was issuing orders or making suggestions. She refused to elaborate, falling back on the word “should” 13 times in 12 minutes press conference.

“I tell them what to do in this state,” she said during one exchange.

Pandemic fame

As the pandemic progressed and the country fractured over conflicting views on the utility of lockdowns and mask mandates, Noem became a vocal opponent of both and became a national lightning rod. She amassed a following on social media and began appearing on right-wing news talk shows, boasting about the comparative strength of South Dakota’s economy thanks to her hands-off approach. Meanwhile, the state’s COVID-19 death rate rose so high that it briefly ranked among the world’s worst.

In July 2020, Noem leveraged his relationship with Trump to win authorization for a fireworks display at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The National Park Service had stopped to allow fireworks there more than a decade earlier, in part because of concerns about embers sparking wildfires in the surrounding forest.

Trump flew in and spoke at the event, which was attended by thousands of people and was broadcast live by national media. The event drew praise as a defiant example of resistance to pandemic restrictions and criticism as an irresponsible large gathering at a time when health officials called for social distancing.

Noem doubled a month later with encouraging people from across the country to participate in the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which ignited a similarly divisive response and more national coverage.

By the fall of 2020, Noem’s national profile had risen so much that she was travels around the country campaign for Trump’s re-election. He lost, but she kept going win her own re-election in 2022 by a comfortable margin, setting the stage for another Trump visit for South Dakota in 2023. Noem announced her support for Trump at that rally, prompting speculation that she could be his running mate in 2024.

Book debacle

Talk of Noem as a vice-presidential candidate ended abruptly in April. The Guardian obtained an advance copy of her second book, “No Going Back,” and revealed passages she wrote about fatally shooting a badly behaved hunting dog and an unruly goat. Dakota Scout, a South Dakota media outlet, challenged Noem’s claim in the book that she had met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and she retracted it.

Noem became the object of national scorn and ridicule for weeks. In interview after interview during a national book tour, she said her decisions to shoot the dog and the goat were proof that she could do difficult things. She said the “fake news” left out important facts and cast the stories in a negative light.

“Most politicians will run from the truth,” Noem told Fox News. “They want to back off and hide to make tough decisions. I don’t do any of those.”

When pressed to explain how an ultimately retracted anecdote about meeting Kim Jong Un made it into her book, she repeatedly said she took it out “as soon as it was brought to my attention” (she had been assisted by a ghostwriter). When pressed further, she refused to elaborate, saying she would not discuss her conversations with world leaders.

Late night TV hosts had a field day making jokes about Noem in their monologues. “Saturday Night Live” mocked her. Yet, less than three months later, she got one talking castle during the Republican National Convention.

No surrender

The week after Trump won the general election, he announced Noem as his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security. She had spent much of the previous year positioning herself as an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s border policies.

It included insertion National Guard troops to assist Texas with border security and convene a joint session of the Legislature give a speech about it. In that speech last year, Noem claimed that Mexican drug cartel activity was widespread on Indian reservations in South Dakota. Her repeated use of similar rhetoric eventually motivated leaders of all nine Native American tribes in the state to forbid her from their lands (at least one tribe recently withdrawn its prohibition).

The tribal banishments were among many controversies Noem endured during his time as governor. Other memorable dustups included accusations that she misused a state aircraft for personal and political purposes, grabbed the watch to help his daughter get an assessment permit, and poorly managed a flood that ravaged a small community while she flew away to a political fundraiser. She also suffered several times published allegations of an extramarital affair with former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, which she denied.

Her first book included a statement of the philosophy that has gotten her through these and other difficulties and the attitude she will bring to Washington.

“My mom will tell you that from the time I was a little girl, every fight I got into was an epic battle for victory,” Noem wrote. “Surrender was not an option.”