Brooks: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s fealty to Trump gets rewarded with Cabinet post

The first time Kristi Noem met Donald Trump, she did what any aspiring governor would do — tried to drum up a little tourism. Come to South Dakota, she told him. See the sights.

“I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime,’” she said, recounting the story to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in 2018. “And he goes, ‘Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’”

Noem burst out laughing, thinking he was joking. He was not.

“He wasn’t laughing,” she said, “so he was totally serious.”

So Noem took Mount Trumpmore seriously, too. She plastered the president’s face on a 4-foot-tall model of the monument and gave it to him as a gift. She reportedly solicited donations to cover the $1,100 cost of the model. Later, she would gather large crowds at the base of Mount Rushmore for a rally in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, so Trump could pose with his face next to Lincoln’s.

On Tuesday came her reward. Trump, a felon who encouraged the violent overthrow of the government in 2021, campaigned on a promise that border security would be his top priority. To that end, he has tapped the governor of South Dakota as his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, according to multiple reports.

It should be noted that Noem cannot cross the border into 1 million acres of her own state. All nine of South Dakota’s tribal nations banned her from setting foot on their sovereign territory.

Noem kept trying to argue that South Dakota is, in fact, a border state because tribal leaders might be in cahoots with Mexican drug cartels. This despite the fact that South Dakota’s drug problems are so widespread that the state once debuted the slogan Meth: We’re On It.

Now, SoDak’s capital, Pierre, is approximately 1,100 miles from the Mexican border and some 589 miles from America’s best border crossing — Minnesota’s Northwest Angle. But what Noem lacks in qualifications, she more than makes up for in unhesitating, unquestioning, uncritical capitulation to Trump’s every whim. And Homeland Security will be the agency tasked with those mass deportations Trump promised on the campaign trail.

In 2021, Noem became the first governor to dispatch National Guard troops — 48 of them — to sweat it out on the southern border (Mexico, not Nebraska). The cost of the stunt deployment was covered by a $1 million donation from Republican billionaire Willis Johnson.

The infuriating idea that random rich guys could move American troops around like pawns on a chessboard if they threw enough money at a politician prompted Congress to ban the use of private funds for interstate guard deployments. A law that didn’t need to exist before Noem came along.

Her attempt to cover up the fact that she rented out 48 National Guard troops for a billionaire’s pet project cost South Dakota $42,000 to settle a lawsuit with the watchdog group that blew the whistle. The funds covered the legal costs to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington after the South Dakota National Guard stonewalled their request for public records on the stunt deployment. Those records also showed that even after the billionaire chipped in, South Dakota taxpayers had to pay an additional $500,000 for the deployment.

Noem didn’t get to be vice president. Any chance at that was derailed by her autobiographical account of shooting her family pets in the face. Now the governor who couldn’t protect her neighbor’s chickens from the untrained puppy she left unsecured in her truck will be in charge of protecting America from threats real and imagined.

For five years, Kristi Noem placed Donald Trump’s wishes above the needs of her own state. This is her reward.