Kristi Noem is the latest Republican to learn you can't outsmart Donald Trump

The South Dakota governor's attempt to emulate the former president's boisterous public image failed disastrously.

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Donald Trump listens to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's speech at a Buckeye Values ​​PAC rally in Vandalia, Ohio, March 16, 2024.

(Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP)

The great reverse charm offensive that is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noems' book tour contains many obvious lessons for aspiring political opportunists. First of all, even if you're not particularly fond of pets, you should refrain from killing them over a whim that Noem confessed to having with her family's wirehaired pointer, Cricket, and a judged goat farm. too dirty and noisy to continue living. Second, even if you've had a four-legged killing spree in your past, it's not a good idea to brag about it publicly in an effort to cement your status as the revenge-wielding villain of the heartland. (This prodigious blunder made Noem persona non grata in the most sacred shrine of Trumpian power: campaign fundraising.)

A week after Noems' PR debut for her political memoir, this inadvertently instructive text provides even more object lessons: Don't brag about fabricated meetings with world leaders, as she (or her ghostwriter) did in the case of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un. And certainly don't devote a lengthy segment of a Sunday network talk show to evasions and incoherent circumlocutions in a desperate effort to distract viewers from whatever precedes. Visibly turning backwards and sideways is a poor marketing strategy for a book called No Going Back. Noem's performance only made her disingenuous tirades about fake news double standards even weaker and irrelevant when they came exactly as intended.

This rapidly multiplying array of promotional lessons can be easily grouped under one broader heading: Don't tie yourself in unsightly, embarrassing bows while trying to be a mini Donald Trump. The primary reason for No Going Backs was to bolster Noems' position as a potential running mate for presumptive GOP presidential nominee and former Oval Office coup plotter Donald Trump, and almost every gruesome anecdote packed between its covers seems calculated to assure MAGA nation and its Mar-a-Lago commander that Noem is a tailor-made Trump vice presidential candidate.

This obsessive quest extends well beyond the book: Like New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Noem has recently devoted most of what can charitably be called her adult life to crude Trump cosplay. After a conservative but otherwise unremarkable four-term run in Congress, Noem was elected governor in 2018 as a devoted MAGA disciple. The transformation was also physical; As Samanthan N. Sheppard, a professor of film studies at Cornell University, told the New York Times, Noem, who previously presented herself with a scruffy, rumpled affect characteristic of her region, now exemplifies white femininity in Miss America, which, as the Times explains, is also reflected in Fox News anchors and that involves cascading hair, long eyelashes and a blinding smile. This smile was the occasion of Noem's best-known controversy before the publication of her book; She posted a lengthy video praising the Texas-based cosmetic dentistry company that gave her a powerful, camera-ready smile and prompted a consumer advocacy group to file a lawsuit against Noem for acting inappropriately as a travel influencer and failing to disclose her financial relationship with the company.

The entire episode, much like the publication of No Going Back, was a prolonged exercise in Trump sycophancy. As Republican strategist Ron Bojean told the Times, Noem's oral overhaul was aimed at boosting her appeal to a single audience. It almost seems like this was all done so Trump could see it. She shows him that she works well in front of the camera, that she has that star power that he wants on stage with him, while fitting into the fashion for women in the Trump universe.

In political terms, Noem's MAGA makeover gained national notoriety at the height of the Covid outbreak, when she was the only state governor to refuse to introduce lockdown measures, a sort of theater culture war that quickly created the disastrous super-spreader motorcycle. rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, and saddled his state with some of the highest infection and death rates in the country during Covid's initial spread. From that point on, there was, uh, no turning back for Noem and her deep-red home state: She hit a re-election landslide in 2022, and soon Afterward, his stock as a potential Trump pick skyrocketed. Like every candidate on Trump's shortlist, she refuses to acknowledge that the 2020 election result was legitimate and toes the MAGA line on virtually every issue, from border crackdowns to Trump's criminal prosecutions and civil trials .

Current problem

However, in the sober light of her sordid book tour, all of Noem's frenzied positioning as Trump's mascot appears to be just the latest part of a prime directive to the Republican Party's national figures: impersonate of the Trumpian model to take political power at your own risk. The path Noem took to rise to the top spot on the GOP talent list was pretty well-worn; after all, it was the same playbook that Ron DeSantis followed during his comically doomed 2024 presidential campaign. 'failure. Florida Governor DeSantis has also presented himself as a more competent and wacky apostle of the MAGA gospel at the state level, right down to the same demagogic resistance to Covid lockdowns. For good measure, he launched McCarthyite campaigns against critical race theory and materials in Florida's curriculum and advanced placement courses that dealt with the legacy of slavery, from Jim Crow and recent marks of racial oppression and exclusion. He gloated that he had made Florida a place where revival goes to die, and gleefully orchestrated cynical (and likely illegal) relocations of undocumented immigrants and amnesty seekers to municipalities across the state blue in order to imitate as many cruel and malicious MAGA leaders as possible. border policies.

Despite fielding dozens of Trump-weary right-wing donors, DeSantis never came close to winning the primaries and retreated to a state of embarrassment, unpopularity and, inevitably, humiliation, richly deserved, in front of Trump. The same basic scenario played out for Vivek Ramaswamy's presidential campaign: The dubious medical investor has positioned himself as a next-generation avatar for the MAGA movement, but he's now pouring all his disjointed debate energy into the task ungrateful to hoist the GOP's lackluster agitprop into the digital void. .

Now, with the predictable deflating fanfare of yet another knock-off political marketing campaign, Noem is on a one-way flight to the MAGA island of misfit toys. The only somewhat edifying twist in this chapter of sparkling Trumpian ambition is that Noem essentially blew her chances in an ill-advised detour into confessional anecdotes, something the tirelessly procrastinating Trump never cared for. Given that Noems' canine-themed send-ups are now approaching their official expiration date, we should probably christen this unanticipated epilogue to No Going Back a kick in the teeth.

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Chris Lehmann

Chris Lehmann is the DC bureau chief for The Nation and editor-in-chief of The Baffler. He was previously editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

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