This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Seth Tupper takes us back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and explores the political legacy of the word "should."
Gov. Kristi Noem used that word to make recommendations instead of regulations. The hands-off approach became her signature in terms of her pandemic policies.
And, according to Tupper, it helped her capture the national spotlight, something she may be looking to recapture soon.
Tupper is the editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight.
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Lori Walsh:
You are listening to In the Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm Lori Walsh.
On March 23, 2020, Gov. Kristi Noem gave a press conference, and it revolved around a single word, "should." The COVID-19 pandemic had just started to slip into the state and spread throughout our communities. Fear and uncertainty were also spreading among South Dakotans, so we turned to our governor and heard a list of things we should be doing.
Seth Tupper is editor in chief at South Dakota Searchlight. He wrote commentary around the politics of "should" and an analysis of Gov. Noem's public health approach during the pandemic.
He is with me now from SDPB's Black Hill Surgical Hospital Studio in Rapid City to say more about that piece, which is available at southdakotasearchlight.com, and some other things we might get to.
Hey, Seth. Welcome back.
Seth Tupper:
Thanks for having me.
Lori Walsh:
I'm so glad that you wrote about this because, of course, I remember this day and hearing your thoughts on this word "should" at the time, but tell me a little bit about this press conference and just how prevalent the word "should" was, and how reporters tried to get her to elaborate on that.
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah. It is one of those things, I think, you need some time to process, and the benefit of hindsight now, it's a lot easier to sort of maybe make some sense of it, but at the time, as you mentioned in your opening, a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty.
Everybody was looking to leaders for guidance, and if there's one thing we always hear or seem to hear about what's important about leadership in a crisis is clear communication, right? And so we have this press conference and we're told there's an executive order coming from the governor, and I guess I was expecting, "Okay. This is it. We're going to get clear communication on what's going to happen in South Dakota and how we're going to protect people from this virus."
So when the executive order came out and when Gov. Noem started talking during her press conference, and as I mentioned in the commentary, everything was, "South Dakotans should do this. Businesses should do that. People should do this." The feeling I had, I dialed into the press conference, and some other reporters were there in the room, but I was just utterly confused because, as I said, we always hear "It's important to be have clear communication in a crisis." And here was a governor who seemed to be, on purpose, being not clear, and I just couldn't understand or comprehend what was the motivation for that at the time.
I pressed her during that if you watched the video from SDPB of the conference, which I embedded in the piece. That video is still on YouTube. You can hear I pressed her.
Some other reporters pressed her, just to ask, "What do you mean by should? Is this a requirement? Is it a suggestion?"
And all she would say in response was, "I'm telling people what they should do," and she just wouldn't clarify any further.
Lori Walsh:
What did this create in the state amongst cities and municipalities?
Seth Tupper:
Well, confusion in a word, and as I mentioned in the commentary, what ensued was weeks of local meetings in some cities and counties throughout the state where various kinds of restrictions were proposed and acted upon in Rapid City, even though the popular narrative about the pandemic and South Dakota has nothing ever shut down. Well, in Rapid City, the state council and mayor did vote to shut down a number of businesses that did actually close for some time because, in the absence of the governor issuing orders, which maybe she would now, as I mentioned in the piece, call "freedom," a lot of mayors and county commissioners felt like, "Well, we're not really getting very clear guidance from the state, so I guess it's up to us." And therefore, a lot of local leaders had to gather, debate, and figure out what they wanted to do to protect their own citizens. You can look at that as, "Hey, that's local control, and that's how it should be," but you can also look at it as mass confusion in a time of crisis.
Lori Walsh:
Right. At some point during this time, our per capita death rate for COVID was the highest in the nation, and then President Trump came to South Dakota for fireworks and the Fourth of July. How did that intersect with masking and what she was saying about freedom at that point?
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah. At the beginning of the pandemic, I don't think any of us could have foresaw that this global health crisis would be the thing that would launch our governor from little old South Dakota into the stratosphere of political stardom, but that is eventually what happened. And her invitation to President Trump to attend a firework ceremony on the Fourth of July during the pandemic was a big part of that.
Lori Walsh:
I'm going to jump in.
Seth Tupper:
Sure.
Lori Walsh:
Do you think it was COVID that launched her, or do you think it was the George Floyd protests and statues coming down, because they ended up at Mount Rushmore with the message of, "You can't tear this down"?
Seth Tupper:
Well, I think it all intersected, but I think it was the pandemic that first put our governor on the radar of political observers nationally, and the attention she got and the way she capitalized on, as I said in the piece, what some called, early on, a lack of clear leadership and confusion, she basically branded as granting people freedom. She really went out and capitalized that, and she got on a lot of political talk shows, and she took a lot of criticism from mainstream media.
That only fueled her rise. Then, during the pandemic, the nation dealt with all these other issues you mentioned, with the killing of George Floyd, the mass protests, and the movement to take down Confederate symbols and things like that, and the backlash against it. She was in position, then, I think, to also try to capitalize politically on some of that, as she and President Trump tried to do during the Rushmore event, but I think it was the pandemic that put her in a position to do that.
Lori Walsh:
So now as we look at what's happening today, memory starts to fade. Some memories, of course, do not fade, especially for people who lost loved ones during the pandemic or people who lost business during the pandemic. But we're moving into an election year. Former President Donald Trump, several indictments, but also a front-runner for the Republican nomination, scheduled to appear in South Dakota, Sept. 8. Talk a little bit about Gov. Noem's star kind of fading, and then what's at stake here in September as Donald Trump returns.
Seth Tupper:
And this is why I wrote the piece now when I did, is because I think a lot of people, me included, have looked at Governor Noem, and the fact that she did not run for president as she seems like she considered, and a lot of people thought maybe she would, that maybe, "Okay. Well, her 15 minutes of national fame is up. It's kind of over." And that had sort of started to be sort of the dominant narrative about her. Then, all of a sudden, here recently in the last couple of weeks, we find out that Donald Trump is going to come to Rapid City on Sept. 8 and appear at a political rally here with Noem as his special guest, as it's been advertised. So it really got me thinking about, "Well, maybe her 15 minutes are not up." When you start thinking it through, Donald Trump doesn't have any real political reason to come to South Dakota.
We have almost no delegates to contribute to somebody who's trying to win the Republican nomination, and it doesn't look like he'll have any trouble doing that anyway. We don't have a lot of mega donors here. The state almost always votes Republican in the presidential contest, and that's not going to change whether he visits or not. So you start to wonder, "Okay. Is Gov. Noem in the mix for his running mate?"
He needs a new running mate. Obviously, the whole rift with Mike Pence I don't think is going to heal after the whole "Hang Mike Pence" episode on Jan. 6. I shouldn't laugh about that, but obviously he needs a new running mate, and if there's any reason for him to come here, and he doesn't necessarily need one.
Donald Trump does what he wants, when he wants. We all know that, but if there is any reason, maybe it's because he's considering Gov. Noem as a potential running mate.
Lori Walsh:
So she has been labeled as a potential running mate before, and he famously likes to keep people maybe on the line. So is it far more likely that this is an audition than a, it's certainly not going to be or I shouldn't say certainly, most likely it's not an announcement. Unless you think that that's a possibility. He wouldn't announce her as a running mate already?
Seth Tupper:
I wouldn't think so, but then, of course, I would never try to predict what Donald Trump would do. I think we've all learned that's a fool's errand, so who knows? But yeah, I don't know.
Lori Walsh:
Do you think it's good for her political clout to be attached to him at this point or not? I mean, if you want a political future, nationally, or even to represent South Dakota strongly at the moment. You need some pretty serious advice whether or not that's the candidate you want to be with right now, because you don't know what's going to happen legally in the months ahead, but it's not looking good.
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah. It's hard to say. I think he'll have different short-term and long-term effects. In the short-term if he's going to be the nominee, and if he wins and becomes president again, obviously it is good for her politically in the short run. One of the things that fascinates me about her is that I think maybe there was a very smart calculation on her part. I've seen her say this many times, that she didn't see anybody who could beat Trump, and there wasn't a path to beat him.
So while seemingly everybody else on the Republican side who was mentioned as Presidential timber is running against Trump, she stood aside and did not, and that sort of makes her one of the only people, then, that's a logical running mate because she was loyal to Trump, whereas many others are trying to beat him. So short term, it could be very beneficial. But as you mentioned, obviously as during the previous show, Meghna Chakrabarti had described Trump as twice impeached, thrice indicted.
Lori Walsh:
Right, yes.
Seth Tupper:
Obviously, there's some long-term risks there, obviously of associating with somebody like that very closely, as Mike Pence has found out, as many people have found out over the years.
Lori Walsh:
Right. I'd be very curious to know. Obviously, she's not going to come on the show and talk about what she thinks about Donald Trump, but she said the first time I ever interviewed her about him, I think that was the, "I don't need him to be a role model, because Jesus Christ is my role model. I just need him to sign legislation that makes sense for the Republican Party."
That was kind of the stance that she was taking at the time. Does that make you want to ride shotgun to somebody to the White House or not? I don't know the answer to that.
Well, you could find Seth Tupper's commentary on southdakotasearchlight.com, and thank you for showing up for the Dakota Political Junkies conversation today. Appreciate it, Seth.
Seth Tupper:
Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to discuss it.
