This week, we learned that Kristi Noem’s husband was living a secret life online. Kristi Noem was sh-tcanned as Secretary of Homeland Security less than a month ago and good riddance. She was terrible at her job and she committed hundreds, if not thousands, of crimes. She’s also a f–king idiot and rumors have swirled for a long time that she’s been banging Corey Lewandowski, who was her deputy at DHS. While Kristi was getting pumped full of Botox and another man’s D, her husband was sitting at home with some hot pants and a box of balloons. Bryon Noem thought “hey, why not make some new friends?” So he was part of a cross-dressing group where he confessed to knowing about his wife’s affair(s) while he had two balloons up his shirt. Well, this is the moment for the New York Times’s favorite cultural-anthropology features: jerking off to small-town America’s simple, unworldly views on big-city political controversies. The NY Times sent someone to Castlewood, South Dakota to talk to Kristi and Bryon’s neighbors about Bryon’s cross-dressing scandal.
Bryon’s cross-dressing photos: “Must be A.I.,” a burly cattle rancher named Kevin Ruesink said as he inspected pictures of his neighbor Bryon Noem that had been published by The Daily Mail on Tuesday morning. The rancher was playing pinochle in the back of a convenience store with five other men in the tiny town of Castlewood, S.D., not far from the Noem family farm…The rancher squinted at them with a mixture of suspicion and pity. “I grew up playing ball with Bryon,” he said. “I’ve never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don’t believe that at all.”
Tenderhearted simple folk: While the pictures of Ms. Noem’s husband with what appear to be enormous inflated balloons under his spandex shirt ricocheted across the internet, becoming a political punchline for her many, many enemies, the reaction back on the proverbial ranch was a little more … tenderhearted. In interviews with locals and friends of the couple before and after The Daily Mail published its pictures, the prevailing sense that emerged was this: People can’t help but feel sorry for Bryon Noem.
The Noem marriage had been the talk of the town: His marriage had been the talk of the prairie since long before Tuesday… The Snow Queen’s dominion over ICE made her a controversial figure, even to some here. But her husband has always been a well-liked fellow around town. He’s got a little storefront office for his insurance business in Watertown. (“Old fashioned service, Easy as pie!” his sign reads). He advertises every week in the local newspaper, The Hamlin County Republican, and he goes to church like a good Christian, as one old man put it on Tuesday. Mr. Noem does not talk politics much, at least not in public.
People in town suspected that Kristi was banging other men: Still, others in town have long suspected something untoward between Ms. Noem and her lieutenant, Corey Lewandowski, who has been by her side for years now. Locals were aware of that moment earlier this month when Ms. Noem was asked, under oath, at a hearing on Capitol Hill whether she’d had sexual relations with Mr. Lewandowski while she was running the Homeland Security Department. She called the question “tabloid garbage.” But she didn’t say no.
LMAO: “I felt horrible for her husband being there,” said Nancy Turbak, a former Democratic state senator who runs a law office out of an old post office building in Watertown. Mr. Noem is her insurance salesman, and a friend of her sons’. “It appears he has consistently been supportive of her,” Ms. Turbak said from a high-backed chair in her office, a buffalo head and a painting of Teddy Roosevelt mounted on the walls above her. The way she saw it, Mr. Noem was “tolerating whatever it was she was doing, and yet, she would bring him there for her own benefit and then subject him to that humiliation…. I am sorry that Bryon is now the subject of so much attention himself, and for any embarrassment he’s experiencing,” Ms. Turbak said after the Daily Mail article dropped. “He never asked for the public life in the first place, and I know him to be a kind and decent man. I wish he were not going through this.”
The Noems brought it on themselves: One person who has known the Noem family for many years is Brad Johnson, a real estate appraiser, conservationist and newspaper columnist who splits his time between Watertown and Rapid City. “People know Bryon as the supportive husband who worked to maintain a normal family life as Kristi’s profile skyrocketed,” Mr. Johnson said on Tuesday. “It shows the price of power and fame is very high. But, Kristi invited this type of coverage by her actions at the Department of Homeland Security.”
I get the sense that the NYT was slightly disappointed that these South Dakotan rubes had nuanced and personal feelings about the Noems. It’s clear that Bryon and Kristi are local celebrities, for better or for worse, and it also seems like Bryon was always going to have more support because he actually stayed behind and still works in insurance locally. Anyway, I don’t feel bad for Bryon or Kristi. I’m pretty sure they both f–king suck and they deserve each other.
Photos courtesy of Getty Images.