Gov. Noem will be trying out for vice president next week during an appearance at a MAGA rally in Iowa.
No doubt the Donald Trump campaign is readying itself for a running mate, so it isn’t surprising that his loyalist S.D. Gov. Kristi Noem will be in Iowa next week speaking at a MAGA rally.
She’ll be appearing at a MAGA event in Sioux City on January 3, at the Country Celebration Events Center, a tiny venue that seats “up to 500 guests.”
That’s pretty small, but in the context of a campaign that typically draws sizable, adoring throngs, it’s probably a safe way to put Noem (seen above in a 2017 meeting with ag leaders in Rapid City in a public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) up there as a means of checking out her potential as a vice-presidential candidate without exposing her to a mass audience right off the bat.
You could probably see it as a tryout. She’s certainly a good fit for the situation. As the daughter of a farming family and governor of an agriculturally-oriented state, Noem should feel comfortable in the Iowa setting, where Trump’s popularity, considering the way ag markets roiled during his presidency, remains a political enigma, at least on the surface.
Why an enigma? And why just on the surface?
Well, given the ag commodity market collapse during his presidency, the fact that Trump has a strong lead in Iowa’s GOP presidential derby is counter-intuitive. His shocking lack of understanding of how agricultural trading networks function underlied Trump’s disastrous “trade war” with China. As a result, Donald Trump nearly pulled down this country’s ag sector. Looking at it from a South Dakotan’s perspective, our major crops were pummeled by the markets. Soybeans got down to some of their lowest “real” prices in history during his administration. Corn and wheat markets followed suit. In 2019, farm bankruptcies surged. Trump’s trade policy was a major screw-up indeed.
An urgent fix, aka cash for farmers, was needed. His administration responded. Reacting to the economic disaster of Trump’s making, it set up a financial mitigation program that paid farmers more than $28 billion in 2018 and 2019.
As it turned out, the program not only mitigated financial distress in the ag sector, it also seems to have mitigated hard feelings against Trump himself.
How’s that?
Well, it’s because the mitigation program proved to be a net financial positive for farming interests.
In 2020, Successful Farming reported that “a handful of Midwest and Plains states [South Dakota among them] emerge as net winners when the impact of retaliatory Chinese tariffs are weighed against the Trump administration’s trade war payments to farmers.” Added economists cited by SF: "Many Midwest states experience net welfare gains as MFP payments totally offset the incidence of tariff retaliation on the state economy."
So, those who are surprised by the support that Trump gets in farm states should consider what was effectively a quid pro quo that was going on between Trump and farmers.
At an Illinois Farmer’s show in 2019, he called it like he saw it, and I think he saw it right. Responding to queries about whether or not farmers were upset by his policies, Trump dismissed any criticism by saying, “well, they can’t be too upset, because I gave them $12 billion and I gave them $16 billion this year. . . . I hope you like me even better than you did.”
The overwhelming support that Trump gets among Republicans in Iowa is an indicator that they indeed still do. Like him, that is. And like him even better, at that.
Gov. Noem, whose family background includes connections to the generously subsidized (to the tune of millions of dollars over the years) Racota Valley Ranch in eastern South Dakota, should be comfortable supporting the cash-dispensing Donald Trump, who is quick to remind farmers that he’s given them payments that, in the aggregate, amounted to more than what they lost because of his trade policies.
Noem’s audition in Iowa next week should go pretty well because on that score, she can certainly relate.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam.
