Quiz: If Trump Is Your President, and Jesus Is Your Savior, Then Who Is South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem?
Vice President, of course, in a GOP that is merging with the Christian nationalist movement
Welcome back! I hope you didn’t miss this week’s podcast with sex educator and erotic filmmaker Tristan Taormino—but you can catch up now. And if you know someone who would like this post, please:
Last Friday, former President Donald J. Trump took the stage at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial outside Rapid City, South Dakota. It was his first campaign rally since his fourth indictment in Georgia. Hosted by the state Republican Party and its Republican governor, Kristi Noem, the event drew 7,000 people, some of whom are people who drive around the country to go to as many Trump rallies as possible.
Since Trump doesn’t need to campaign there to win the South Dakota primary or the state’s measly three electoral votes in November 2024, why was he there? One answer is testing the relationship with Noem. She endorsed Trump for President during the rally as everyone expected her to since she would also be a logical choice for the number two slot on the ticket. Now in her second term, Noem has a 61% approval rating, is the tenth most popular governor, brings in tons of federal money for South Dakota farmers, and ran a wide-open state during Covid. She backed a zero-tolerance abortion law but does not support punishing women for having abortions. She could hold her own on the debate stage with Kamala Harris.
There’s no question that Noem wants it: she used $5 million in Covid relief funds to advertise herself across the nation in 2020, money that might have been used to help people in a state that had the third highest death rate from the disease that year. An ambitious person, she has cultivated her relationship with Trump since 2016, since it is unlikely that she could ever mount a campaign for the presidency from South Dakota without being elevated to the veep spot first. At least, no one from South Dakota ever has.
Noem has also pulled off the unlikely feat of not looking like a clown while simultaneously acting like one. In an excerpt from a 2022 memoir tied to bring her to attention just prior to campaign season, Noem discusses the close bond she forged with the Former Guy in 2017 over reversing an Obama-era ban on fireworks at Mount Rushmore. Noem describes the fireworks ban as resulting from piddling “environmental concerns” on the part of the federal government, which controls the park surrounding Mt. Rushmore. That isn’t true. After many years of permitting fireworks, the ban was implemented by the Obama administration because an infestation of Ponderosa beetles killed an unusually high number of dead trees, making the forest a dangerous fire hazard. So, if the Black Hills go up in flames and take out Rapid City next year, you’ll know who is to blame.
But here’s the question: what can Kristi Noem offer Trump? Political and religious authenticity.
Unlike Trump, who cultivates a religious aura without actually being religious, Noem is a very serious and public Christian. In the memoir, Noem infers that she was called by God to be a politician. For example, when she and her husband Bryon debated whether Noem should run for Congress, she worried that if she did not run, it would be “disobedient to what God may be asking us to do." As governor, Noem signed a bill that allows South Dakotans to refuse services to LGBTQ people on religious grounds, and she has (unsuccessfully) tried to put prayer back in the state’s public schools. “I have been, over the last 10 years, just constantly surprised by the amount of people who think that religion and prayer cannot be in our schools,” Noem told a podcaster in 2022. “And that that is what our Constitution and Founders intended, which is not true whatsoever.”
As a political bonus, Noem hits all the same GOP extremist buttons that Ron DeSantis does, except that she is not grossly unlikeable to other Republicans, she isn’t in the awkward position of having to criticize Trump because she is running for president, and she doesn’t attack popular corporations that bring tourism to the state. Noem banned critical race theory in K-12 by executive order. She has signed legislation that bars trans athletes from competition and a second bill that prohibits gender-affirming care for minors. She has signed the Moms for Liberty pledge that affirms parents’ right to complete control over their children. She has refused to allow undocumented immigrants to be transported to her state by the federal government. She hunts, and trolls the libs by displaying the corpses.
“Call me when you are American,” Noem sneered to the immigrants, a MAGA-savvy performance worthy of Ann Coulter.
Trump is incoherent on all of these issues, which his core supporters don’t care about, but other extremist voters do. True, his immigration policies were cruel, but they were also haphazard and ineffective. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, Trump reduced legal immigration, but border crossing continued, and deportations dropped dramatically between 2017 and 2020. Trump employed undocumented people in his businesses well into his presidency, and he failed to build his signature Wall. Most importantly, in the three years since he left the presidency, terrain in the GOP has shifted to favor culture wars that he neither understands nor seems to be particularly interested in. But the so-called “war on woke” has added a new wrinkle: a politician must not only say terrible things about immigrants, people of color, and queers; that person must actually do them. And Trump has not been in a position to do any of the things that his chief, if feeble, rival Ron DeSantis has done.
As importantly, Noem has used these issues to tie white evangelicals tightly to her. According to Christianity Today, 73% of white evangelicals already support Trump, but that is slightly down from the 81% who voted for him in 2020, and could erode further as the indictments against him compete with the campaign for attention. Kristi Noem would please them. But here’s a shocking factoid for you, that suggests she might draw in more voters. According to the Pew Research Center, white Trump supporters “were far more likely than those with less favorable views of the former president to begin identifying as born-again/evangelical Protestants” between 2016 and 2020.
Trump has been signaling his desire to move closer to Christian nationalism for some time, since most of his appeals to voters are organized around the idea that the Apocalypse is imminent. Phrases like “we won’t have a country anymore,” and references to undocumented immigrants as an “invasion” presage the kind of chaos fictionalized in neo-Nazi texts like The Turner Diaries, a popular extremist novel in which white supremacists use violence to rally others to their cause. Not surprisingly, on the campaign trail this year, as indictment after indictment has dropped on his head, the former president has consistently referred to the 2024 election as “the final battle.”
In Rapid City last week, with Noem by his side, Trump positioned himself as a sacred figure that stands between his supporters and the collapse of the nation under Democratic leadership. This, he argues, is why he is being persecuted by all of these indictments. But it is not just persecution; it is martyrdom. As Trump told the crowd: “I’m being indicted for you,” and that being indicted is “not part of the job description, but I’m being indicted for you.”
Trump is not exactly saying that he is Jesus, but he is certainly embracing the idea that he is God’s representative on earth, sent to do an important task. This is something that his increasingly Christian base already believes. In the spring of 2021, I was in Florida visiting relatives, and one of the neighbors had hung a banner styled as a Trump campaign gear that read: “Jesus is my savior, and Trump is my President.” The comparison to Christ was jarring, even to someone as secular as me, but this kind of talk wasn’t new. In 2019, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry surfaced this sentiment in an interview with Fox News when, according to Samuel Lovett at The Independent, he equated Trump with several Biblical Kings who weren’t “perfect” but capably represented God on earth anyway.
Perry expressed this in “a little one-pager,” which he gave to Trump, telling him: “‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one and I said, ‘You were.’” He then assured Trump that he had been “sent by God to do great things.”
Now, let me say: if you are a believing Christian, you know that we are all put on earth to do great things. It’s not just one or two of us; it’s everyone. This is why anti-abortion folks say things like: “The baby you want to abort could cure cancer!” It’s not that it’s a sure thing that a collection of human cells sitting in your uterus will cure cancer, mind you, but you can’t know what God’s wish was for that child in the first place.
Whether Trump actually is Jesus in this scenario, or another figure (and let’s face it, there are lots of them in the Bible) that God sent to earth, hardly matters. The point is that in some evangelical quarters, Donald Trump has taken on divine qualities, and when he tells his followers that he is standing between them and persecution, it is believable within a certain cosmology. And the idea that Trump isn’t just one of God’s creatures, but something akin to the second coming of Christ is now all over the iconography of the MAGA movement. In 2020, a painting of Trump being crucified (he wore an American flag loincloth, Nancy Pelosi jabbed a spear into his side, and a MAGA hat hovered over him) circulated widely on right-wing social media. Although the painting may have originally been satirical, “The internet being what it is, images of the painting went viral without any context, sparking fury and scorn,” Bethania Palma wrote at Snopes. “Some viewers commented on social media posts containing images of the painting, and said it was blasphemous. Others interpreted it as a sincere representation of the fervor with which Trump's base revered him.”
As his post-January 6 troubles have ballooned, and his political behavior becomes ever fringier, Trump has not just promoted, but embraced the idea that he is one of God’s messengers. For example, in September 2022, Trump re-shared a post on Truth Social that declared him “Second only to Jesus.” It’s important to note that numerous white evangelical leaders have spoken out against Trump since January 6, but many also endorse him. Furthermore, the unchurched quality of evangelical Christianity makes many vulnerable to being organized by political, not spiritual, leaders. Christian nationalist organizations like Pastors for Trump and the “army of God” being recruited by ReAwaken America (founded by disgraced White House national security advisor Mike Flynn and Oklahoma businessman Clay Clark,) have promoted the idea that Trump is “an irreplaceable figure whose political success is crucial to God’s plan for redeeming a sinful world.”
So, this is where Kristi Noem potentially fits for a 2024 campaign. She gives the “war on woke” a friendly, maternal face and infuses it with genuine religious faith—might strengthen a terrible convergence in the United States between the most extreme forms of Christianity and a nationalist political movement led by Trump, officially turning the GOP into a Christian nationalist party.
Just to let you know:
Dahlia Lithwick’s Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Penguin/Random House, 2022) has just come out in a paperback edition! Dahlia was an early guest on the “Why Now?” podcast. You can listen to that interview here.
Short takes:
Well, they ain’t gonna teach on Maggie’s Farm no more! In a survey of 4200 faculty in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas, Megan Zahnias and Audrey Williams of the Chronicle of Higher Education make it official: politicizing education and threatening university professors has begun a brain drain to states where they can teach truthfully and without fear. “Two-thirds of respondents said they wouldn’t recommend academic work in their state to colleagues. About a third said they were actively considering employment in another state, while 20 percent have interviewed elsewhere since 2021,” Zahnias and Williams write. But, there’s more: “Salary and the local political climate were the top reasons cited for seeking another job, with concerns about academic freedom, tenure, and DEI work also topping the list. About 30 percent of respondents said they worried about shared governance, LGBTQ+ issues, and reproductive-health and abortion access.” (September 7, 2023)
Virginia’s Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, raised $3 million to flip the Virginia legislature: Republicans currently hold hte state Senate and are within three seats of a majority in the House of Delegates. Like former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, if Youngkin launches a bid for the presidency (presumably, this would include Trump dropping out because of his legal woes), he will occupy the “successful Republican in a Blue state lane.” How does he plan to edge out a veteran pol like Christie? Youngkin will “play offense on abortion and essentially set the legislative elections as a referendum on his proposed 15-week ban,” writes Amy Walter at The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. There’s a slim chance that Youngkin could pull off a nomination for 2024, but he does want to show that “Republicans can effectively counter Democrats' advantage on the issue of abortion” by carving out an incrementalist model and showing that voters in Blue districts will support it. (September 7, 2023)
In New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait takes the hottest new leftwing boychick to the woodshed for a new book that assumes, rather than proves, that liberalism is a rotting corpse that needs to be replaced by a left-wing alternative. “Moyn’s study of the Cold War liberals loads the deck by selecting an idiosyncratic cohort of intellectuals to study, leaving out some of the most important figures in Cold War liberal thought (Hofstadter, Schlesinger) while including several non-liberals, like Hannah Arendt and Lord Acton, and even conservatives, like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Friedrich Hayek,” Chait writes about Yale historian Samuel Moyn’s new book, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press.) “It’s a lot easier to depict the Cold War liberals as enemies of progress if you sprinkle a dose of conservatives into your sample.” (September 7, 2023)
Yes--and we know how much looks matter to Trump. Glad you liked it, Katha!
Great post, Claire. It's also possibly relevant that Noem is very beautiful. Choosing a woman would help protect Trump from claims of misogyny and violence against women. Sometimes I despair.