Who is Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick for homeland security secretary
CNN
In choosing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his homeland security secretary, President-elect Donald Trump is tapping a long-time loyalist to helm an agency that’s expected to play a central role in his immigration crackdown.https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/politics/kristi-noem-homeland-security-secretary/index.html
In choosing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his homeland security secretary, President-elect Donald Trump is tapping a long-time loyalist to helm an agency that’s expected to play a central role in his immigration crackdown. She will work closely with two immigration hardliners, incoming deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller and administration “border czar” Tom Homan — both early choices that signaled Trump is serious about his pledge to conduct mass deportations. Noem, 52, is a former state legislator and four-term congresswoman who was elected governor of South Dakota in 2018 and reelected in 2022. Her profile grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she rejected mask mandates and social distancing. But she is perhaps best-known nationally for the controversy that followed the publication of an excerpt of her memoir earlier this year, in which she revealed she’d shot and killed a family dog, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer named Cricket, in a gravel pit because the dog was was “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.” Facing backlash, Noem defended her actions, writing on X that her book had “more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping.” She also retracted a story in the book about a meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, indicating that such a meeting never happened.
The US State Department is advertising an up to 10-million-dollar reward for information leading to the capture of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who the agency first designated as a terrorist more than a decade ago, saying his group had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria.” Yet, Jolani is also the leader of the rebel forces that just toppled the tyrannical regime of Syrian dictator Basher al-Assad in a fast-moving offensive that surprised the world.
A judge has paused an ongoing lawsuit against Linda McMahon, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, that accuses her and the company she once led, World Wrestling Entertainment, of failing to act on allegations of sex abuse of children who helped ringside at wrestling events in the 1980s.