The formation of Donald Trump’s second Government continues at a good pace behind the walls of his private Camelot, the Mar-a-Lago mansion, in Palm Beach (Florida). The latest name to leak to the American press was, early this Tuesday, that of the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, to whom the president-elect will offer the secretary of Homeland Security. It is one of the key cabinet positions for someone who won the election promising to close the border to illegal immigration and the largest deportation in history. One of Noem’s main responsibilities – as it was for Alejandro Mayorkas in the Joe Biden Administration – will be the management of the 3,200 kilometers of border that separates the United States from Mexico.
If her appointment finally materializes, Noem will have command over a Department with a budget of $60 billion and thousands of officials under her command. During Trump’s first four years in the White House, five people held this position, which was permanently in the eye of the storm.
The governor’s profile meets the two main requirements shared by all the appointments announced by Trump since the transfer market opened last Thursday with the appointment of Susie Wiles, the first Chief of Staff in the history of the White House: all Those elected (five men and three women) are part of the hardline wing of the Republican Party and all, without exception, have proven to be loyal to the president even in his lowest hours; that journey in the desert that he went through after leaving the White House for the first time, after trying to subvert the legitimate result of the 2020 elections with the incendiary spread of a hoax that led to the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.
Noem, governor of a not very relevant state in the Union (it has just over 900,000 inhabitants), acquired national fame this spring, first, and then international fame, with the publication of Not Going Back(No Turning Back), a memoir in which she revealed how one day years ago she killed one of her puppies, a 14-month-old dog named Cricket. That macabre confession was meant to serve her, in her head, to show herself to the world as a tough woman, who does not postpone problems. In practice, and after the diary Guardian publish that isolated extract, it meant the end of her options as a candidate for vice president in a country divided in almost everything, but united by the love of its pets. Noem was in all the pools, but after it was learned that she was capable of killing a dog, they disappeared. Trump finally chose Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate (who, by the way, also rose to fame with the publication of a more edifying memoir: Hilbilly, a rural elegy).
Noem and Wiles were joined these days – especially on Monday, which was hectic at Mar-a-Lago, even though it was a holiday – by the names of Tom Homan, who will be “border czar” and has already applied with a heavy hand Trump’s immigration policies in his first term, and Stephen Miller, another anti-immigration hawk, who will serve as White House deputy chief of staff. In climate matters, he has chosen Lee Zeldin, who will head the environmental agency with the mission of eliminating regulations. The president-elect has also designed the leadership of his foreign policy, with the appointment of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State, the first Latino to head US diplomacy; ultra congresswoman Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the UN, an organization that Stefanik considers an “anti-Semitic institution”; and Mike Waltz to whom Trump has offered the position of national security advisor.
musical session
Noem’s name returned to the headlines along with that of the Republican candidate when in the final stages of the campaign they both starred in one of their most extravagant episodes. It was in a place called Oaks, in Pennsylvania. Trump was in the middle of an event in which he answered questions from the audience. It was hot in the room. The indisposition of two attendees forced the event to be stopped twice for a short period of time. After the second interruption, Trump asked to listen to the Hail Mary, by Schubert, and then said, “Who wants to hear questions when we can listen to music?” Trump then let a loud voice ring for 39 minutes. playlist of her favorite songs, while Noem, host of the event, stood by her side, half amazed and amused.
The episode of the little dog began like this in his memoirs: “He was a German wirehaired pointer and he had come to us from a home that had to deal with his aggression.” That day, the future governor had guests at her ranch and they went hunting. Cricket He spent the morning running ahead of the game, “scare[ing]away the birds” and not obeying his owner. On the way back, they stopped at a neighbors’ farm, and the dog ran away and killed a few chickens. The animal tried to bite its owner when she managed to catch it.
“I hated her,” she recalls in the book. That was when he decided that “he had to sacrifice her,” and that he had to do it with his own hands. “I stopped the truck in the middle of the road, took out my gun, grabbed the strap and took it to a pile of gravel.” Then, the author implies that she carries it out: “It was not a pretty task, but it had to be done.” A few paragraphs later, he adds: “Leading is not always fun (…). The world is full of charlatans and evaders [de sus responsabilidades]. “We need people to act.”
After the scandal broke out CricketTrump reacted at a private campaign fundraiser in New York. “I’m very curious about the dog,” he said in an amused tone, according to the accounts of those present, who observed more sympathy than criticism in his words. “[Noem] “It’s been there for us for a long time,” he added. “She’s loyal, she’s great.”
In her memoir, the governor also included an episode in which she said that, during her time as a congresswoman, she met Kim-Jong-un, supreme leader of North Korea. When the first copies of the book were put into circulation, suspicions began about the veracity of that memory; Noem decided to delete it in subsequent editions, and argued that its inclusion had been a “mistake.”