South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem delivers her 2025 State of the State address to lawmakers at the Capitol in Pierre on Jan. 14, 2025. (Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s advancement to the cusp of confirmation as a Trump cabinet secretary probably surprised some people who thought her career ended nine months ago with a notoriously disastrous book release.
It’s no surprise to Noem, who’s been thwarting predictions of her demise since her first statewide race 15 years ago.
The biggest story of that campaign was a revelation of 20 speeding tickets on her driving record. It turned out to be the first of many scandals, controversies and negative headlines Noem would overcome on her climb to national prominence.
Following two hours of questioning Friday in a U.S. Senate committee hearing, all that stands between Noem and her appointment as secretary of Homeland Security is a vote by the full Senate. That’s anticipated sometime soon after President-elect Donald Trump’s Monday inauguration.
Noem will then resign as South Dakota’s governor and head to Washington, D.C., to lead an agency that oversees two of the most important issues to 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 run in 2028 when Trump will be unable to seek office again due to term limits.
In other words, it’s the kind of leap that the 53-year-old Noem has been taking ever since a family tragedy sparked her interest in politics more than three decades ago.
“My whole life,” Noem said in her infamous book last year, “is about taking risks.”
Defined by death and taxes
Noem inherited much of her risk-taking personality from her 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 up a moldy crust atop the grain. An unseen cavity under the crust gave way, and he was sucked under multiple tons of corn. He suffocated while rescuers made frantic efforts to save him.
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As Noem’s family grieved, they were confronted with a federal estate tax of about $170,000 on her father’s $2 million estate. Much of the estate’s value was tied up in land, cattle, stored grain and equipment, plus loan debt, making it difficult for the family to pay the bill.
Tax experts said Arnold could’ve avoided that outcome with an appropriately structured will. Noem called that “fake news’ in 2017, telling a Courthouse News reporter, “For a decade after a tragic farming accident took my dad’s life, the death tax impacted nearly every decision our family made.”
Noem’s anger about the estate tax eventually motivated her to enter politics. She won a seat in the state House of Representatives in 2006 and served from 2007 until 2010.
That year, she entered a crowded Republican U.S. House field and won the primary election. She went on to beat incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin by 2 percentage points in the general election, overcoming the speeding-ticket revelation along the way.
In Congress, Noem voted for legislation to weaken the estate tax, including the Tax Cut and Jobs Act that passed during Trump’s first term in 2017. Among the law’s provisions is a doubled estate tax exemption, so that individual estates worth up to $13.99 million 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 standing behind Trump, she scored a prime spot near the middle of the frame, over the shoulders of the vice president and the Senate majority leader.
To Congress and back
After four terms in the U.S. House, Noem turned her attention back to South Dakota in 2018, where 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, while she flew back and forth frequently and slept on a pullout bed in her congressional office.
“Whenever Bryon and the kids were in town, we blew up air mattresses and threw down quilts and basically had 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 attracted Trump to the state for a fundraiser in the fall. That helped propel her to a three-point general election victory over Democratic legislator 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 COVID-19 cases.
Noem often says, as she did last week in her State of the State speech, that South Dakota was “the only state that never forced a business or church to close.” That simple description obscures a complicated reality.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, Noem advised South Dakota schools to close 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 an executive order listing 20 things South Dakotans “should” do: People “should” engage in social distancing, businesses “should” prevent customers from congregating in close quarters, health-care facilities “should” postpone elective surgeries, and so on.
Reporters asked Noem to explain whether she was issuing orders or making suggestions. She refused to clarify and fell back on the word “should” 13 times during a 12-minute press conference.
“I am telling them what they should be doing in this state,” she said during one exchange.
Pandemic fame
As the pandemic wore on and the country fractured over conflicting views about the usefulness of shutdowns and mask mandates, Noem grew vocally opposed to both and became a national lightning rod. She racked up social media followers and began appearing on right-leaning news talk shows, where she boasted about the comparative strength of South Dakota’s economy thanks to her hands-off approach. Meanwhile, the state’s COVID-19 death rate soared so high that it briefly ranked among the world’s worst.
In July 2020, Noem leveraged her relationship with Trump to win authorization for a fireworks show at Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The National Park Service had stopped allowing fireworks there more than a decade earlier, due in part to 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 outlets. The event drew praise as a defiant example of resistance to pandemic restrictions, and criticism as an irresponsibly large gathering at a time when health officials were encouraging social distancing.
Noem doubled down a month later by encouraging people from around the country to attend 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 traveling the country campaigning for Trump’s reelection. He lost, but she went on to win her own reelection in 2022 by a comfortable margin, setting the stage for yet another Trump visit to South Dakota in 2023. Noem announced her endorsement of Trump at that rally, fueling 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 misbehaving hunting dog and an unruly goat. The 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 a subject 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 evidence that she could do difficult things. She said the “fake news” was leaving out important facts and spinning the stories in a negative light.
“Most politicians will run from the truth,” Noem told Fox News. “They will shy away and hide from making tough decisions. I don’t do either of those.”
When pressed to explain how an ultimately retracted anecdote about meeting Kim Jong Un got into her book, she repeatedly said she took it out “as soon as it was brought to my attention” (she’d been assisted by a ghostwriter). When pressed further, she refused to elaborate, saying she wouldn’t discuss her conversations with world leaders.
Late-night television hosts had a field day cracking jokes about Noem in their monologues. “Saturday Night Live” mocked her. Yet, less than three months later, she was given a speaking slot during the Republican National Convention.
No surrender
The week after Trump won the general election, he announced Noem as his pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security. She’d spent much of the prior year positioning herself as an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s border policies.
That included deploying National Guard troops to assist Texas with border security and calling a joint session of the Legislature to deliver a speech about it. In that speech last year, Noem claimed Mexican drug cartel activity was rampant on Native American reservations in South Dakota. Her repeated use of similar rhetoric eventually motivated leaders of all nine Native American tribes in the state to ban her from their lands (at least one tribe recently retracted its ban).
The tribal banishments were among many controversies Noem endured during her time as governor. Other memorable dustups included accusations that she misused a state airplane for personal and political purposes, improperly intervened to help her daughter obtain an appraiser’s license, and mismanaged a flood that ravaged a small community while she flew away to a political fundraiser. She also suffered multiple 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’s gotten her through those and other difficulties, and the attitude she’ll bring to Washington.
“My mom will tell you that from the time I was a little girl, every battle I got in was an epic struggle for victory,” Noem wrote. “Surrender was not an option.”
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.