(C) South Dakota Searchlight
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Be careful what you wish for, Gov. Noem • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
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Date: 2024-11-14
In Trump World, where loyalty is valued over expertise, Kristi Noem’s fealty to The Donald has paid off — big time. South Dakota’s governor is Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
A longtime supporter of Trump, Noem was last seen with the president-elect moderating his campaign town hall in Oakes, Pennsylvania. Noem managed to keep a straight face while Trump decided to forgo taking questions and turn the event into a dance party. Now that’s loyalty.
Running Homeland Security is no small task. The department is responsible for customs, border and immigration enforcement, the response to natural and man-made disasters, anti-terrorism and cybersecurity as well as overseeing the Secret Service. Created in 2002 by President George W. Bush as a response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the department has 230,000 employees and a $60 billion budget. That’s quite a change for Noem who, in her second term as governor, oversees a state budget of $7.3 billion with 7,373 executive branch employees.
Noem is not without some southern border experience. She signed off on several federal National Guard deployments as well as deciding to send three deployments to the border on her own volition. History will decide if she was a wartime governor or just the world’s worst travel agent. No matter the final verdict, South Dakota taxpayers were left to pick up the tab when Texas decided it was not too proud to ask for help, but it was too poor to pay back the states that sent troops.
From her time as a U.S. representative, Noem is familiar with national security briefings. Unfortunately, those briefings gave her the false memory of having stared down North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
As the secretary of Homeland Security, Noem will be right in the thick of Trump’s top election issue as he plans for mass deportations and beefed-up security at the southern border. Given her past rhetoric on the subject, this is a challenge that Noem will readily accept. Accepting this big a job in the next Trump administration comes with some potential pitfalls.
While Noem will be running a large staff, the president-elect has made it clear he means to clear out the federal government’s bureaucrats and civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists. Here’s hoping Noem can avoid that kind of purge in her department where employees should be judged by their expertise in security matters and not the size of their MAGA hat collection.
If Trump II is anything like Trump I, Noem won’t be able to count on any sort of job security. In his first term, Trump was known for going through Cabinet secretaries the way other men change their shirts. His new hires are touted as the “best people,” but it turns out that the guy famous for the “Art of the Deal” isn’t the best at the art of hiring. These “best people” get the insult treatment on the way out the door: Former chief of staff John Kelly was “way over his head,” former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was “a dumb southerner,” and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “dumb as a rock.”
Trump has been pushing the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to stay out of session so he can make recess appointments and bypass all the time-consuming nonsense of holding Senate hearings and voting on his Cabinet picks. Noem may hope he’s able to pull that off.
Chances are, even the most conservative of senators was a pet lover before going full MAGA. There are bound to be tough questions for Noem about why she chose to take target practice on an errant hunting dog and a smelly goat. Of course these senators are all politicians and their bigger, likely unspoken question will be why, in a book designed to serve as a resume for selection as Trump’s running mate, she chose to include that story at all.
Now, Noem is close to the end of a sometimes painfully public attempt to insert herself into the next Trump administration. As she starts her new job, she’s likely to get plenty of advice. Here’s some more that, while unsolicited, is worth heeding: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
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