Kristi Noem got the ultimate participation trophy Friday: a bronze statue of herself on horseback, unveiled in South Dakota to honor her six-year tenure as governor, which ended in 2025.
The ousted Department of Homeland Security chief attended the ceremony just days after she was spotted getting cozy with her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski, near Minneapolis—a city they previously terrorized.
Noem, who lost her top job in March, and her family members appeared to be the only ones at the unveiling. Her husband, Bryon Noem, was not there.
The Noems’ marriage has been on increasingly shaky ground since March, when reports exposed Bryon’s secret online life in the “bimbofication” fetish scene. In July, Kristi’s mother said the couple was planning to divorce and that Bryon had moved out—though there was still no public divorce filing.
There were two figures in the statue honoring Noem: The 54-year-old grandmother herself and a horse. The bronze Noem was decked out in a cowgirl hat. Meanwhile, the real Noem was fired by Donald Trump amid scrutiny of a $220 million self-promotional advertising campaign, as well as her controversial oversight of brutal ICE arrests. But she has apparently moved on.
Noem and Lewandowski, her former top aide—who is married and has four children—were spotted biking and dining on Tuesday in Wayzata, Minnesota, a lakefront city about nine miles west of Minneapolis—the same area where two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed within three weeks of each other in January by federal immigration agents dispatched as part of a massive immigration crackdown known as Operation Metro Surge.
Noem was replaced as head of DHS by MMA fighter-turned-Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin. She was handed a new job as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, a multinational military and political security framework created by Trump around the same time Noem was axed.
Internet users weren’t slow to react to news of Noem’s latest vanity project.
One X user responded to the news with an edited image of the statue—this one featuring Noem shooting the bronze animal next to her, which was depicted as a dog. He captioned it: “Fixed it.”
It was a blatant dig at Noem’s admission that she fatally shot her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer puppy after he went after a chicken—an incident she recounted in her memoir, No Going Back.
