Lock up your dogs ‘cause Kristi Noem is back.
Donald Trump confirmed on Tuesday that the South Dakota governor will serve as Homeland Security secretary in his upcoming administration.
“Kristi has been very strong on Border Security,” Trump wrote in a statement. “I have known Kristi for years, and have worked with her on a wide variety of projects—she will be a great part of our mission to Make America Safe Again."
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Noem, for her part, said she was “honored and humbled” to accept the role.
She will be joined by two other anti-immigration firebrands–former ICE chief Tom Homan and alleged white supremacist Stephen Miller–serving in senior positions within the department.
It’s something of a return from the cold for the South Dakota rancher and farmer after her admission in an autobiography published earlier this year to having once killed a family dog saw her sidelined from the Republican shortlist for Trump’s running mate.
In fairness, she’s not the only right-wing figure to have recently been outed over a penchant for animal cruelty. There’s also Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who’s accused of once having delivered his neighbor’s dog to a similar fate, and the revelations over new NRA chief Doug Hamlin’s role in the 1980 torture-slaying of a frathouse cat.
Nor is it the only bizarre claim to have come out of her 2024 memoir No Going Back, which features a fairly unhinged anti-seatbelt crusade and a passage implying she allowed motorcycle gangs to break COVID-19 laws in South Dakota as an F-you to the ‘nanny state.’
Oh, and that’s all before you get to the bit about an apocryphal meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that we’ve, um… yet to hear any evidence actually took place.
Whatever her flair for autofiction, there’s little doubting Noem’s anti-immigration credentials make her a natural Trump pick for Homeland Security secretary. She gave full-throated backing to the Republican president’s ‘Muslim ban,’ and has tried to block the Biden administration from housing undocumented migrants in South Dakota.
What may be more up for debate is her awareness, if any, of the irony of her appointment as adjudicator of who doesn’t and doesn’t get to come into the country.
That’s as a governor who, lest we forget, is presently banned from entering any tribal lands in her home state after making unsubstantiated claims in January that South Dakota’s reservations are facilitating an “invasion” of Mexican drug cartels.
