We fade in.
It’s 2024, South Dakota. (That’s the one that has Mount Rushmore in it, not the Fargo one.) Wind sweeps through the prairies, kicking a plastic bag up to a billboard that declares: “Meth. We’re On It.” Across the road, the governor’s mansion, where in the window Kristi Noem is on the phone with a book editor.
“Yes, Laura, I did actually meet with Kim Jong Un. It just wasn’t covered at the time, because of course it wasn’t,” Noem says, in that accent you have to be ancestrally Lutheran to have. “You tell that fact-checker of yours he needs to learn about something called liberal media bias.”
A moment passes. You hear a pop in the distance. Noem’s husband, Bryon, yells apologies from a locked bedroom across the hall. “Just, uh, trying out balloon animals,” he says. Another excuse. Noem rolls her eyes and continues on the phone, exasperated.
“Yeah, so I double-tapped a wirehaired pointer, who gives a shit?” she yells, fiddling with her hair extensions. Human, obviously. What is she, a refugee? “I shot a goat too. Didn’t like his attitude. That’s real America. It’s staying in. Nonnegotiable.”
And scene.
This is how I hope and pray Kristi Noem’s inevitable biopic will begin. Veep is a masterpiece, but not even Armando Iannucci could’ve written a story like Noem’s off the dome. Her bumbling political life is one of the most fascinating to have ever taken place: a woman who destroyed her own chances of becoming vice president by lying about meeting foreign leaders and then admitting to dog murder in a memoir published just months before the Republican National Convention, then became secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then lost the job amid accusations of adultery, corruption, and incompetence, and an uproar over a multimillion-dollar PSA that prominently featured her on horseback. She’s now serving as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a fake-sounding diplomatic post Trump created for Noem after he fired her from DHS last month.
