 "Donald Trump and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem dance during a town hall campaign event in Oaks, Pennsylvania. Source: Reuters.")
Donald Trump, the US President-elect, has picked South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to serve as his next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a report by CNN cited two sources familiar with the selection as saying.
Noem will take over the department which witnessed massive turmoil during Trump’s first term in office.
The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, is responsible for everything from border protection and immigration to disaster response and the US Secret Service.
Who is Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick for DHS secretary?
Trump is serious about his assurance to crack down on immigration pledges made by him and with Noem’s selection, he is ensuring a loyalist will lead an agency he prioritises and the one which is key to his domestic agenda.
Noem is currently serving her second four-year term as South Dakota’s governor following a landslide re-election victory in 2022.
She rose to national prominence after she refused to impose a statewide mask mandate during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
Kristi Noem once been on Trump’s shortlist for vice president
She was also once seen as a possible running mate for Republican Trump. But the chance diminished after her relationship with Trump shifted following the negative rollout surrounding the publication of her memoir: “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”
In her book, Noem revealed that she once killed her 14-month-old wirehair pointer, Cricket, when she was not displaying the signs of an ideal hunting dog.
She faced widespread backlash and some Trump advisers said they believed that Noem’s stock had fallen in Trump’s eyes at the time when she was still a VP contender.
In excerpts first reported by The Guardian, Noem wrote that the dog was “untrainable” and later argued that those anecdotes were meant to show how capable she is of doing some of the more gruesome jobs in life when necessary.
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