Who is Kristi Noem? A look at the anti-LGBTQ+, dog-killing governor and vice president aspirant

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been much in the news lately due to content in her autobiography, with many journalists and late-night comedians focusing on her story of killing a dog she deemed untrainable. There are many other eyebrow-raising passages in the book, No Going Back, such as a questionable claim that while she was in Congress, she met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The uproar could tarnish her reputation as a Republican rising star and hurt her chances to be Donald Trump’s running mate. Still, Noem has a very Trumpian record, including opposition to LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights. Here we take a look at who she is and where she came from.

Where did Noem come from?

Noem has credited being a pageant queen with putting her on the road to her political career.

Noem, who grew up in a South Dakota farming family, won the crown as Snow Queen at a state festival in 1990, when she was in her late teens. Running for queen gave her experience in public speaking, she told South Dakota’s Aberdeen News in 2016.

“It was the first time I had sat down and done an interview with multiple people,” she said. “It was very educational. To stand up and speak in front of individuals or a large amount of people at the Snow Queen contest was a first as well.”

The win brought her a college scholarship, which she used to attend Northern State University in Aberdeen for two years. She went back to the family farm when her father died in 1994. She eventually finished college at South Dakota State University, earning a degree in political science in 2011.

What's Noem's political résumé?

Noem’s first political office was as a South Dakota state representative. She was elected in 2006 and reelected in 2008. She ran for the state’s sole seat in the U.S. House in 2010, won in the Tea Party surge that year, and was reelected three times. Not surprisingly, she received low scores on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard — zeroes for three terms and 30 in one, when she was credited for not supporting an LGBTQ-exclusionary amendment to the Violence Against Women Act.

She was elected South Dakota governor in 2018, making her the first woman to hold the office, and reelected in 2022. Her actions as governor include many anti-transgender ones. In 2021 she issued executive orders barring trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports, one affecting K-12 public schools, the other for state colleges and universities. She issued the orders after refusing to sign a bill providing for the trans ban, largely because she feared retaliation from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. But she turned around and signed similar anti-trans legislation in 2022. When the stars of the reality series We're Here, who traveled the U.S. promoting LGBTQ+ equality, tried to meet with her, she stayed in her office and refused to see them. She founded a project called “Defend Title IX Now,” planned as a national coalition to oppose trans inclusion in women’s sports, but it went nowhere and is now defunct.

Early in 2023, she signed a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans minors in South Dakota. That came shortly after her administration ended the South Dakota Department of Health’s contract with a trans group called the Transformation Project, which Noem said was “dividing our youth with radical ideologies.” The Transformation Project sued the state, and this year the group won an apology and a $300,000 settlement.

She has signed other regressive bills into law, including a ban on the teaching of so-called divisive concepts in public higher education and a “religious freedom” measure that civil rights activists say could enable discrimination. She has defended the state’s ban on almost all abortions and threated to jail pharmacists who provide abortion drugs.

How did she rise to national fame?

Noem has drawn the attention of a wide swath of right-wingers by speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. She addressed CPAC as a freshman member of Congress in 2011, positioning herself as a proud outsider in Washington, D.C. “A lot of us freshmen don’t really have a lot of knowledge about the ways of Washington. And frankly, we don’t really care,” she said to much applause.

By the time she appeared at CPAC in 2021, she was considered a potential contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She spoke out against COVID-related shutdowns, saying they were unnecessary and had wrecked the economy, and mask mandates, which South Dakota had resisted. (In early 2021, the state was leading the U.S. in COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita.)

“The question of why America needs conservatives can be answered by just mentioning one single year, and that year is 2020,” Noem said. “Everybody knows that almost overnight we went from a roaring economy to a tragic, nationwide shutdown.”

She also claimed there was “an organized, coordinated campaign to remove and eliminate all references to our nation’s founding and many other parts of our history.”

Noem ended up not seeking the presidential nomination, but she’s firmly pro-Trump and has been mentioned as a running mate. At CPAC in 2024, she and former presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy tied for the lead in a straw poll regarding vice-presidential contenders, with 15 percent each. But now the revelations in her book could make her a liability to Trump’s campaign.

What’s the deal about Noem's book?

No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward is actually Noem’s second book; both are in the campaign biography genre. She wanted to include the dog-killing story in her first book, 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From the Heartland, sources recently told Politico.

“Then, as now, Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand,” Politico reports.

The anecdote made it into No Going Back, and it caused an uproar when The Guardian reported on it, having received an advance copy. Noem describes a 14-month-old wirehair pointer named Cricket as having an “aggressive personality” and being untrainable as a hunting dog — so she shot and killed Cricket. Shortly afterward, Noem did the same thing to a “nasty and mean” male goat her family had owned. She also has suggested that one of President Biden's dogs, Commander, deserved the same fate after biting Secret Service agents. Commander no longer lives at the White House.

Amid the outrage and cries of “puppy killer,” Noem has continued to insist she did the right thing. “It was a dog that was extremely dangerous,” she told Fox News host Sean Hannity. Cricket had “massacred livestock,” attacked Noem, and posed a threat to her children, the governor added.

She’s pushed back against interviewers who’ve suggested that including the story was not a smart move. When Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney asked if she’s talked with Trump about it, she said, “Enough, Stuart. This interview is ridiculous, what you are doing right now. You need to stop.”

Another much-criticized passage in the book is Noem’s assertion that she met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while she was in Congress. There’s no record of the meeting, and it seems unlikely that it occurred — he was hostile to the U.S., and she was a low-ranking representative.. Noem has given conflicting answers when questioned about it, at one point saying it would be corrected in the book — which came out Tuesday — and at others saying she couldn’t give details about her meetings with world leaders. But she hasn’t said the meeting didn’t take place. She also narrated the audio version of her book, containing the passage.

In addition, she claimed to have been scheduled for a meeting with French President Emanuel Macron, which he canceled, and to have had an unpleasant conversation with former South Carolina Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — accounts both have denied. But perhaps having a dodgy relationship with the truth would make her an ideal running mate for Trump.