It pays to play
ProPublica uncovers just where Kristi Noem may have gotten her $50,000 Rolex:
In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.
Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.
Noem’s lawyer did not respond to follow-up questions regarding the $80,000 payment.
ProPublica outlines what is known of her family finances:
Before being named Homeland Security secretary, overseeing immigration enforcement, Noem spent two decades in South Dakota’s government and the U.S. House of Representatives, drawing a public servant’s salary. Her husband, Bryon Noem, runs a small insurance brokerage with two offices in the state. Between his company and his real estate holdings, he has at least $2 million in assets, according to Noem’s filing.
Readers may recall that when Noem had her purse stolen from a restaurant in April, she’d been carrying $3,000 in cash ostensibly for “dinner, activities, and Easter gifts.”
Timothy Noah lampoons ICE Barbie as “the biggest fool in Trump’s Cabinet.” Even if there is an innocent explanation behind one of its least wealthy members owning a Cosmograph Daytona, “a politician who just appears to convert $80,000 in political contributions to personal use should have better sense than to wear a $50,000 watch to a photo op.”
Not that other politicians, Democrats included, haven’t drawn unwanted attention for wearing attention-getting Rolexes.
Noah adds:
The $80,000 payment is recorded in a tax filing by American Resolve Policy Fund as going to Noem’s personal company, Ashwood Strategies LLC, for “fundraising.” Both firms were registered in Delaware within minutes of each other in June 2023. American Resolve, according to the tax filing, has no employees. It’s a sort of petty cash fund, apparently, from which Noem spends as she sees fit, mostly (but not exclusively) on political activities.
Even at this late date, it’s unusual for a politician to convert any portion of political contributions raised to personal use. “If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney now at the nonprofit Brennan Center, told ProPublica.
Maybe not as disturbing as Noem bragging about shooting her dog, or her yearslong tête-à-tête with Cori Lewandowski (both are married), or wearing the Rolex to visit a Central American gulag, but yeah.
Of course, thanks to Donald Trump this sort of thing is getting less unusual by the hour. During the 2024 campaign, Trump used political contributions to pay his legal fees, and the president’s political suitors routinely fill his pockets by buying meme coins or Truth Social stock or booking stays at Trump resorts. Noem was operating at a much more modest scale, but as the saying goes: The fish rots from the head—picking up the odd Rolex, it would seem, along the way.
We’ve not only defined “America” down, we’ve redefined grift as public service.
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