The First Gentleman of South Dakota Had a Secret
Fake breasts, fetish models, and $25,000 in Cash App payments. The family asks for prayers.
I thought the strangest thing to come out of hacking Trump’s lackies was Kash Patel’s belly dancing. But no, Ice Barbie’s husband Byron might have well jumped out of cake.
There is a certain poetic justice in the universe, and it has a wicked sense of timing.
Kristi Noem, Ice Barbie, the glamour governor, the sequined scold who made a national career out of policing other people’s gender expression, was fired by Donald Trump last week. She had barely cleared her desk at the Department of Homeland Security when the Daily Mail dropped a thunderbolt from the plains: her husband, Bryon, had a secret life. A very pink secret life.
Bryon Noem, 56, insurance man, South Dakota pillar of traditional values, had allegedly been spending his evenings chatting up women in the “bimbofication” community, a fetish subculture devoted to the aesthetics of hypersexualized, balloon-breasted Barbiedom, and sending them selfies. In one photo, he appears wearing a flesh-colored top stuffed with balloons and tight pink shorts. He reportedly sent $25,000 to three women via Cash App and PayPal. The account name was Jason Jackson. The voicemail said: “Noem Insurance, leave a message.”
Someone Googled it.
“You turn me into a girl,” he apparently told one of his online companions. “Should I put on leggings?”
Reader, he put on the leggings.
Kristi’s spokesperson confirmed the family had been “blindsided.” Kristi was “devastated.” They asked for privacy and prayers. Trump told the Daily Mail he felt badly. He hadn’t seen anything. He knew nothing. He was shocked, shocked to find gender-bending going on in the establishment.
This is the Grand Old Passion Play, performed on an endless loop, with a fresh cast of characters and the same third act. The senator in the airport stall. The pastor with the second phone. The architect of the bathroom bills whose own bathroom contained multitudes. The conservative movement has been staging this production for so long that it ought to have its own Broadway run. It practically does.
Kristi Noem spent years as the prairie Savonarola of gender. She signed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act to let businesses discriminate against gay people. She banned transgender girls from sports. She banned gender-affirming care for minors. She stood at podiums and warned about the threat posed by children who were confused about who they were.
Bryon was apparently less confused.
The irony, and it is a many-layered confection, like a Barbie Dream Cake, is that Bryon Noem is not, strictly speaking, a hypocrite. Cross-dressing is not a gay or trans identity. He is, apparently, a straight man with an unusual hobby and a very bad alias. The hypocrisy belongs entirely to his wife, who spent a career making life harder for anyone who deviated from the gender binary while the man she married in 1992 was asking strangers to rate his figure in pink shorts.
The Noems were high school sweethearts. They attended the same church. They had three children and espoused traditional values on social media with the enthusiasm of people who had something to prove. Now Kristi is out of a job, her husband is in the tabloids, and their thirty-year advertisement for Christian family life has acquired some complicated footnotes.
Counterintelligence expert Jack Barsky called Bryon’s judgment “astounding.” That’s the polite version. The impolite version is that the woman responsible for keeping the nation’s borders secure was married to someone conducting a parallel digital life under a pseudonymous Cash App account, which is precisely the sort of thing foreign intelligence services look for when they are trying to find leverage over Cabinet secretaries.
Bryon denied being a blackmail risk. The family asked for prayers.
He should count his blessings anyway. Had his particular kink run toward dressing as a dog - we all know what happened to Cricket.
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