Governor Kristi Noem’s surprise overnight flight to Washington on Air Force One after her Trump-Rushmore hate rally on July 3 was weird. Governor Noem’s unannounced day trip to Washington on July 22 was also weird. Noem didn’t tout these trips in the press before or after.
The New York Times reports that Noem’s junkets to D.C. junkets were related to the scenario we’ve been sniffing in South Dakota since April: Kristi Noem wants to go back to Washington, quite possibly as a replacement for Vice-President Mike Pence.
NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman detail Noem’s year-plus planning to stroke Trump’s ego at Mount Rushmore:
Since the first days after she was elected governor of South Dakota in 2018, Kristi Noem had been working to ensure that President Trump would come to Mount Rushmore for a fireworks-filled July 4 extravaganza.
After all, the president had told her in the Oval Office that he aspired to have his image etched on the monument. And last year, a White House aide reached out to the governor’s office with a question, according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation: What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?
So last month, when the president arrived in the Black Hills for the star-spangled spectacle he had pined for, Ms. Noem made the most of it.
Introducing Mr. Trump against the floodlit backdrop of his carved predecessors, the governor played to the president’s craving for adulation by noting that in just three days more than 125,000 people had signed up for only 7,500 seats; she likened him to Theodore Roosevelt, a leader who “braves the dangers of the arena”; and she mimicked the president’s rhetoric by scorning protesters who she said were seeking to discredit the country’s founders.
In private, the efforts to charm Mr. Trump were more pointed, according to a person familiar with the episode: Ms. Noem greeted him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness: his [Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, “How Kristi Noem, Mt. Rushmore, and Trump Fueled Speculation About Pence’s Job,” New York Times, 2020.08.08].
Trump hasn’t said publicly that Pence’s job is up for grabs, but John Bolton says in his new book that Trump asked him on a Christmas 2018 flight to Iraq about booting Pence. NYT hears from multiple sources that a senior Trump advisor has “recently lamented to others that Mr. Trump could have boosted his re-election campaign had he replaced Mr. Pence with a woman.”
Team Kristi and her new best boy-pal and Air Force One seatmate Corey Lewandowski insist she’s happy staying here. “She’s focused on being the governor of South Dakota,” Noem’s New Jersey mouthpiece Maggie Seidel tells the Times. But NYT looks at Noem’s installation of a private video studio in the Capitol, her frequent Fox News appearances (eight archived on her YouTube channel so far this summer… possibly more than Governor Dennis Daugaard did in eight years), and her faithful aping of radical Trumpism and recognizes Noem’s focus is on more than South Dakota policy and politics.
So, apparently, does VP Mike Pence. Noem evidently requested the D.C. meeting with Pence to soothe his job anxieties. Under the cover of briefing DHHS Secretary Azar and Pence on coronavirus in South Dakota (conversations that could have been done just as effectively, for less money, via videoconference), Noem sought her audience before Pence for purely partisan and personal political purposes:
But less than three weeks later, Ms. Noem came to the White House with far less fanfare — to meet not with Mr. Trump, but with Vice President Mike Pence. Word had circulated through the Trump administration that she was ingratiating herself with the president, fueling suspicions that there might have been a discussion about her serving as his running mate in November. Ms. Noem assured Mr. Pence that she wanted to help the ticket however she could, according to an official present.
She never stated it directly, but the vice president found her message clear: She was not after his job.
…One official close to the vice president said that Ms. Noem did not discuss her Air Force One flight with Mr. Pence but used the conversation to say she wanted to help the campaign however she could. The official suggested that the vice president’s team has an opportunity for her in mind: helping Mr. Pence prepare to debate whichever woman Mr. Biden selects as his running mate [Martin and Haberman, 2020.08.08].
One could look at this NYT report and conclude that everything is goig according to Kristi’s White House plan. She gets face time with Trump on Air Force One. She knocks Team Pence so off balance that she has him granting her a private audience and tweeting about their conversation to dispel rumors that he might lose his job to a beauty queen. And she gets her story promoted from speculation in South Dakota blogs and the Pierre paper to a New York Times article that gets the national audience chattering about the possibility of what she coyly insists is not a possibility: Vice-President Kristi Noem.
Pence’s own fear that Noem is after his job and the national attention to her intrigue puts the departure of her daughter from her nepotistic sinecure in a new light. If Mom is leaving for the campaign trail (Noem keynotes the Pottawattamie County Republican Party’s Lincoln-Reagan dinner in Council Bluffs on Friday, September 4), daughter Kennedy needs to bail before Noem’s replacement brings on his own flunkies.
The Republican National Convention will nominate its Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates on August 24, behind somewhat closed doors.
Mandatory clothing was ‘positive pants’ and she told Mike to turn that frown upside-down
Our self promoting governor. Every single day, in every single way.
ah yes, the Prairie Palin.
Good one Buckobear, reads all the newspapers our Prairie Palin does, but cannot name one…other than Fox and Friends..is that a newspaper?
Noem will “out-Palin” Palin! So proud. The GOP-the party that brought down the USA.
“[S]he’s focused on “being” the governor of South Dakota….” Really? (My emphasis added)
But “out-shocking” Arron Schock: “efforts to charm Mr. Trump were more pointed…Noem greeted him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness….” Who pays for this sheit ? This is truly a clown car: “… a Republican official familiar with the conversation: What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?” We need a muscular Inspector General! We need qualified people in leadership positions.
So a WH official is entirely unfamiliar with the facts that a state government has ZERO control over what happens in a Federally controlled National Monument. Why am I not surprised that members of the Trump staff are completely clueless as to how our government is structured or works?
I had just assumed the Trump trip was to get in one last visit to the monument before it is demolished — the President heard that there was gold in them there hills, and in keeping with his policy of national park exploitation, was ready to mine.
Generally, since (Wiki) 1986, the Reagan years, the GOP has been renewing its racist stance, gun loving, and evangelical bullsheit to win elections. They have duped Americans. Noem, Thune, Rounds and Johnson sing this song.
Whether Noem is officially “Palinized” by Trump/GOP/McConnell(Thune) may be worth a laugh. Tactical camo caps for NRA RUSHMORE militia! AR-15s for all! JFC
“Republican” SCOTUS “Chief Justice Earl Warren [steered a unanimous rule of law in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education.[8][9][10] In some states, it took many years to implement this decision, while the Warren Court continued to rule against the Jim Crow laws in other cases such as Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964).[11] Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
Southern Democrats (racist Republicans) and McCarthy had their fling.
Since 1964 Republicans (Goldwater) have been scratching to eliminate Jefferson and Lincoln’s primary legacies of freedom.
Mikey, you’re my brother and I love you.
I wonder if South Dakotans are surprised by Kruel Kristi’s ineptitude, grifting and sliminess, or if those who have known her expected this?
Generally, in Portland unidentifiable para-militarized HS/FPS/CBP camouflaged “shock troops”* arresting people at night away from federal property and statues, are authorized largely by acting/“performing the duties of…” unqualified/non-Senate-confirmed political hacks loyal-to-Trump, and investigation/analysis/protester arrests by Homeland Security are being “conducted”** to the exclusion of authorizing statutes. The Senate-unconfirmed loyalist acting-types and their shock troops are not trained or knowledgable in the LEO duties conducted in Portland, and now perhaps in Chicago and other federally invaded cities.
Is this federal focus to the exclusion of proper Homeland Security functions including counter-intelligence of Russian ect hacking of media and interference with functions of our and other democracies?
Yes, so Trump can get the photo op of “tough on crime,” but and tough on antifa, regardless of armed right wing paramilitary threats in state capitols. ***
Wasn’t it Sen Susan Collins and Lamar Alexander who expoused Impeachment would teach trump a lesson? See Lawfare and National Security Law recent podcasts.
*Acting loyalist leaders vociferously complain “shock troops” is too Nazi-ist a descriptor! ** so far there is no evidence that any “arrests” of protesters have resulted in any federal charges being filed or court appearances have occurred. Take-over of local law enforcement by federal agents pretending to be soldiers is largely illegal/unconstitutional. Protesters are being unconstitutionally intimidated by federal shock troops.***
Even before 2016’s election Special Forces (USN Seals) were seen flying trump political flags; and right wing extremists are embedded in sheriff and police forces nationally. They appeared friendly with LEO at the Unite the Right event leading to assaults and death of counter protesters. Failure to counter and convict armed paramilitary right wing extremists in Bundy-Nevada and Bundy-Oregon takeovers of Interior department grazing violations protected by BLM LEO, and federal Bird Sanctuary facilities protected by FBI agents, has given new energy to violent/armed right wing extremist groups.
The GOP has threatened or sued against references to “Right Wing Extremist” as a media descriptor of these rising groups threatening homeland security from within. Some of these groups are “dog whistled” with approval every time Noem appears publicly in her function as governor wearing a tactical camouflage cap festooned with right wing or ultra patriot velcro patches that have been politicized.
Apparently now local Portland Oregon police are moving in. Newer media accounts are not yet available to me. More to follow.
Kristi reminds me of Michele Bachmann when she was in the House, with being on FOX every couple days and having an inflated sense of herself.
My prediction is Kristi will be back in Washington before you know it and wants to run for President in the worst way, just like Bachmann did.
To actually put out a press release saying that she is not running for President in the future means she is very much thinking about it.
SDs Kristi Noem has changed for the worst. She is not the same person when she started out 10 years ago.
GOP spin blog tries to dismiss NYT’s reporting as mere gossip, ignores the fact that Noem is focusing more on her national profile than on real problem-solving here in South Dakota.
Another example of embedded right wing extremists in LEOs:
@thehill
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Colorado police officer suspended after using fake name to post “kill them all” comments about protesters http://hill.cm/cxxRO
Keep up that dog-whistling GOV Kristi!
Cont.
Pompeo’s corrupt neutered State Dept.
(This will be added to my related “list” comment in today’s thread.)