Donald Trump has an attack dog and her name is Kristi Noem. As the snowy streets of Minnesota erupted this January, Noem has become the face of Trump’s spin to valorise the brutality of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and to demonise the protesters in its path.
Noem is a grandmother, although she doesn’t look it, a living embodiment of Maga’s fiat for women to get sprogged up before the age of 25 and then stay that age forever. We learned about the existence of her granddaughter, Addie, when Grandma Kristi spoke gushingly to a 2023 NRA forum about Addie’s appetite for gun ownership. “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too.” Addie at this point was not quite two years old.
Noem has always been an advocate of owning guns and using them. Before she became Trump’s second-term Homeland Security Secretary, she was the Republican governor of South Dakota, a local politician in the Sarah Palin mode who grew up on a ranch. She became best known to international observers as a woman who had shot her own dog – and then implied she’d like to do the same to Joe Biden’s German shepherd.
A memoir released in April 2024 was supposed to position Noem as a Trump running mate: instead, it started a national debate about whether it was really appropriate to shoot Cricket, a wirehead pointer, after Cricket escaped Noem’s control on a pheasant hunt. Later in the memoir, Noem wrote of her dreams of moving into the White House and disposing of Biden’s dog, Commander. (“Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.”) She lost the VP race, but her career survived.
In South Dakota, however, Noem’s term as governor is best remembered for two things: resisting pesky federal government attempts to impose Covid controls, and sending the South Dakota National Guard far beyond state lines to hunt immigrants near the Mexican-US border. (The National Guard is a set of reserve units, raised and based in each state, to back up the federal army – it goes back to 1636.)
Noem even teamed up with a billionaire who promised to fund the deployment – until Biden intervened to ensure that the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act federally banned National Guard units from crossing state borders on the payroll of private donors.
Noem was outraged: “If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states’ rights,” she tweeted. Since the American Revolution, American conservatives have argued that US states need to keep their militia as independent as possible from federal control, and Noem drew on a long tradition of regional resistance in her complaints.
The row was a vote winner for Noem’s political master Trump. US Republicans have long warned their voters that Democrats are “coming for your guns”. At that point, to certain Republicans, the Democrats seemed to be coming for individual states’ guns, too, all in the service of the most demonised people in America: Hispanic immigrants desperate to cross the southern border.
Once Trump himself regained the White House, that determination to keep state forces out of federal control melted away. In June last year, he sent ICE to California. Areas of Los Angeles rose in protest: the BBC has reported that some of these protests were violent. Trump responded by federalising California’s National Guard, removing it from the jurisdiction of liberal governor Gavin Newsom. Now, those California forces answered to Washington DC.
Kristi Noem encouraged the policy. If Newson were doing his job, she opined in a TV interview shared on her department’s social media pages, “our ICE agents would not be injured and attacked while doing their jobs and carrying out immigration enforcement. Under the leadership of @POTUS, Trump we will put the safety of American citizens FIRST not these criminal illegal aliens that sanctuary city politicians are defending.”
This is how Noem operates. South Dakota’s opposition to federal government is framed as a defence of the American constitution itself; California’s opposition is in service of foreign interests – illegal aliens – and the “sanctuary city” metropolis.
Your next read
square COLIN DRURY How I ParentI tried ’empty weekend’ parenting. I got lie-ins and happy children
square MATTHEW ELLIOTTLeaving the EU was the best thing Britain ever did
square IAN DUNTRejoining the EU is the only way to stop Trump
square MINNA ÅLANDER What Does Putin Do Next?Putin’s coldest war is under threat from deadly pathogens and melting ice
We saw the same hypocrisy again over the past week, as Noem sprang into action to defend the killing of Alex Pretti. Pretti, a veterans’ nurse who protested against ICE’s presence in Minnesota, seems to have embodied the spirit of the American constitution as a man who believed both in rights-based legal process and the right to bear arms. Pretti appears, in multiple videos, to have been shot after his lawfully held gun, which he had not pointed at officers, had been removed from him. “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said of Pretti. I don’t know, Kristi, perhaps the sort of peaceful protester who also gives their grandchild a shotgun and a rifle?
Such hypocrisy is easy to spot. For Americans, however, and anyone who values its Constitution, the issues run far deeper than easy gotchas. In 2026, National Guard soldiers carry bulletproof vests and semi-automatic rifles, rather than waistcoats and bayonets. But as the US marks 250 years since its foundation in 1776, US politicians are still hashing out the same debates. Who calls the shots when the centre and the states turn on each other? Who decides on the difference between a “well-ordered militia” and a rabble of “domestic terrorists?”
For years, Republicans were on the side of the locals and the gun owners. This tenet is so core to the party that some of its supporters may finally be pushing back against Trump. If not, they will allow Kirsti Noem to rewrite America’s oldest political fault line.
Hence then, the article about kristi noem has awakened america s oldest conflict it won t end well was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Kristi Noem has awakened America’s oldest conflict. It won’t end well )
Also on site :