Judged across a wide spectrum of criteria, there are a lot of really atrocious governors in the country of ours. It would hard to find worse cases than Ron DeSantis (FL), Kim Reynolds (IA), Brian Kemp (GA), Gina Raimondo (RI), Bill Lee (TN), Mike Parson (MO) and Kevin Stitt (OK)... hard but not impossible. No one is in a category of horribleness with Krisi Noem, Trumpist hack in South Dakota. She isn't just responsible for 66,278 cases and 644 deaths in her own state, Noem is responsible for a revived pandemic across the entire Midwest. She should be charged as a mass murderer in North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana. These states are suffering big time, with hospital capacity (including staff) stretched to the breaking point, all because of Noem (and Trump). This table shows the number of cases per million residents, among the worst on the planet:
North Dakota- 85,144 cases per million residents
South Dakota- 74,919 cases per million residents
Iowa- 59,692 cases per million residents
Wisconsin- 54,403 cases per million residents
Nebraska- 50,745 cases per million residents
Montana- 44,936 cases per million residents
Minnesota- 40,963 cases per million residents
Wyoming- 38,866 cases per million residents
Another above 20,000 per million is considered an out-of-control pandemic. Public health officials warned that if people don't practice social distancing and wear masks, rates would soar much higher as they have in Noem Country. They warned her not to have big, crowded events, so she doubled down on doing exactly that-- having a series of big crowded events that spread COVID-19 all over the Midwest. She's worse than an idiot. She's a criminal-- and she intends to run for president in the future.
So let's get Joe Sneve's Argus Leader report from over the weekend into the record. She's gone out of her way to warn that if Biden enacts a lockdown or mask mandate she will resist and refuse to enforce it in a state where 1 in 10 people will probably have been infected by the time Trump is booted out of the White House. Sneve wrote that "the first-term governor, who's risen to stardom in the Republican party for her hands-off approach to managing the pandemic, has no intention of using state resources to enforce any federal COVID-19 orders." He quoted her tweeting that "We already know that lockdowns don't stop the spread of the virus. However, they destroy small businesses and jobs, and they make it difficult for families to put food on the table."
Her communications consultant told the Sioux Falls newspaper that "It's a good day for freedom. Joe Biden realizes that the president doesn't have the authority to institute a mask mandate. For that matter, neither does Governor Noem, which is why she has provided her citizens with the full scope of the science and trusted them to make the best decisions for themselves and their loved-ones."
The folks who elected her, looked at what she and Trump did to their state-- and handed Trump a huge victory over Biden, 261,043 (61.8%) to 150,471 (35.6%). Only 6 of South Dakota's 66 counties had the collective brain power to vote against Trump. In fact 33,000 more South Dakotans voted for Trump this year than in 2016!
