That couldn’t be him, could it?
The cartoonishly large breasts. The pink spandex. The come-hither stare.
“Must be A.I.,” a burly cattle farmer 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 farmer 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.
These men all knew Bryon Noem as the nice, tall insurance salesman who married Kristi Arnold, the town beauty queen who grew up to be governor. But now there were these pictures.
The farmer 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.”
The British tabloid report on Tuesday was the latest and most dramatic development in the saga of Kristi Noem, who was sacked as homeland security chief earlier this month, the first Trump cabinet member to get the old heave-ho this term. She quickly put out a statement saying that she was “devastated” by the images of her husband and that “the family was blindsided by this.”
In response to multiple requests for an interview, Mr. Noem wrote in a text message on Tuesday: “I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.”
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.
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His marriage had been the talk of the prairie since long before Tuesday.
Castlewood is part of a larger community with Watertown, a more sizable town about a 15-minute drive north. Many who live in these parts have known the Noems since they were high school sweethearts who got engaged on the Fourth of July in 1991, when Bryon proposed while they watched fireworks from aboard his Grandpa Mitchell’s boat out on Lake Kampeska. A lot of people here say they remember Ms. Noem when she was still Kristi Arnold, working in her mother’s coffee shop in Watertown. (It was called Past Times.) People still refer to Ms. Noem (often sarcastically) as “the Snow Queen,” after the state pageant she won when she was young.
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.
Many 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.
The moment was made all the more awkward by the fact that Mr. Noem had accompanied his wife to the hearing, though he did not appear to be in the room when she was asked that particularly awkward question.
“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.”
And so, people around town were wincing for him on Tuesday.
“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.”
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 Brian 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.”
On the edge of Castlewood, there is a gas station that sells AR-15s. Dozens of animal heads hang from the walls. “Kristi for Governor” stickers stick to the countertops. One man who was in there Tuesday morning looked at the report in The Daily Mail and shook his head sorrowfully. He didn’t know what to believe about Bryon Noem. Only that he liked him.
“Such a nice man,” he said. “It just tears me up.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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