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Adios Kristi! Noem’s Long History of Lying to Protect the Powerful
Nearly a decade before she was the public face of DHS, Noem’s tall tales about the estate tax helped gut one of the few remaining checks on elite fortunes.
Mar 05, 2026
Kristi Noem will no longer be the face of the Department of Homeland Security, labeling peaceful citizens defending liberty as “domestic terrorists.” President Donald Trump is now appointing her to a new position of “special envoy in the Western Hemisphere.”
Wherever she goes next, we should remember her DHS debacle wasn’t her first deception rodeo. It turns out that Noem has a long history of twisting the truth to serve the powerful.
In 2017, nearly a decade ago, we caught then-Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) telling a whopper fib about her family’s experience with the estate tax—or what Noem called the “death tax.”
The estate tax, our nation’s only levy on the inherited wealth of multimillionaires and billionaires, has been in place since 1916. In its first half century, it helped put a brake on the build-up of concentrated wealth and power, discouraging dynastic fortunes that threatened democracy.
It’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
But for the last 30 years, the estate tax has been under right-wing assault, including a steady drumbeat for its repeal. And one tactic they’ve used is to claim the tax applies to small farmers and other working Americans, rather than the tiny percentage of extremely wealthy estates it actually targets—exclusively multimillionaires and billionaires, the top 0.01%
Noem’s personal political narrative, repeated at town hall meetings during her 2010 campaign for Congress, is a yarn about a rapacious and greedy federal government imposing an estate tax on her struggling family.
In a 2015 speech on the House Floor and in a 2016 op-ed for Fox News, Noem repeated the estate tax story. After her father died, Noem claimed, “We got a bill in the mail from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy that happened to our family.”
“We could either sell land that had been in our family for generations or we could take out a loan,” Noem said, adding that “it took us 10 years to pay off that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes.” Noem says the episode was “one of the main reasons I got involved in government and politics.”
In December 2017, Noem was appointed by then-House Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the joint committee working to reconcile the 2017 Trump tax bill—which at the time included a proposal to eliminate the federal estate tax altogether.
That month, I published a widely circulated op-ed about Noem in USA Today arguing that “her sad family saga doesn’t add up.”
My commentary surfaced several simple facts: The federal estate tax has a 100% exemption for spouses. In other words, if a spouse dies, the estate’s assets go to the surviving spouse without any estate tax. Corinne Arnold, Kristi Noem’s mother, was alive during these years. (In fact, she is still alive now at 78 years and was active in Kristi’s second campaign for South Dakota governor in 2022.)
Estate tax attorney Bob Lord noted at the time: “It’s hard to believe the estate of a farmer who died in 1994 and was survived by his spouse was subject to the tax. It easily could have been deferred. That would have been a no-brainer.”
Moreover, the process of filing a return can be extended for years, especially for operating farms.
The combination of family tragedy and populist outrage makes for a potent partisan story, but veers from the truth. In the years she campaigned as a victim of the estate tax, Noem’s family actually cashed millions in government farm subsidies. Between 1995 and 2024, her family’s Racota Valley Ranch in Hazel, South Dakota deposited $4.9 million in government subsidy checks.
A few days after my USA Today article, the Argus Leader, South Dakota’s biggest statewide newspaper, wrote an editorial: “Time for Kristi Noem to Get Her Tax Story Straight.” In her now well-known deflective fashion, Noem fired back that it was “fake news.”
If Noem’s estate tax story is true, she could easily put our doubts to rest. She could explain why her family didn’t use a spousal exemption, share a redacted “bill” from the IRS, or disclose who provided the loan she allegedly received. But she hasn’t.
In the meantime, Noem has helped gut the estate tax, contributing to the growing concentration of wealth that threatens our economy and democracy.
Under the Trump tax bill Noem worked on, the federal estate tax now exempts the first $15 million of wealth for an individual and $30 million for a couple. And as governor of South Dakota, Noem fortified the state’s role as a trust haven, attracting billionaires interested in forming dynasty trusts to hide wealth and use loopholes to avoid federal taxes.
The Trump administration and its allies have blamed immigrants for all manner of social ills—including struggling schools, expensive housing and healthcare, and more. In reality, the blame more often lies with extremely wealthy people who won’t pay their fair share of taxes to support public programs.
So it’s strangely fitting that Noem, who now slanders law-abiding immigrants and the citizens defending them as “domestic terrorists,” played a big role in gutting those taxes on the rich.
These lies—about the estate tax, about immigrants, about protesters—have something in common: They protect the powerful. As lawmakers attempt to hold Noem accountable for the reckless activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and consider her for future jobs—they should keep this early story in mind.
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‘These Guys Can’t Help Themselves’: Cruz Pushes $200 Billion Capital Gains Tax Cut Without OK From Congress
Republican senators said they were seeking to end an "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans." But nearly all the benefits of their proposal would go to the wealthiest 1%.
Mar 03, 2026
Two leading Republicans are pushing for the Trump administration to issue another $200 billion tax cut, primarily to the wealthiest Americans, without congressional approval.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-SC) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging him to use executive authority to lower the federal tax on capital gains—the profits from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, and other investments.
The senators have proposed that capital gains taxes should be “indexed for inflation." As the Post explained:
The plan pushed by Cruz and Scott has been sought by conservatives for many years. Under current law, an investor who bought $100 worth of stock in 1990 and sold it today for $300 would currently owe capital gains taxes on the full $200 in profit. But the $100 investment in 1990 would be worth roughly $230 in today’s dollars after accounting for inflation. Under the Cruz-Scott proposal, the investor would only owe taxes on that $70, rather than the full $200.
The senators called on Bessent to "eliminate" this "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans."
According to Federal Reserve data from 2025, the richest 1% of Americans owned about half of all stocks, while the poorest 50% owned only 1%.
Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which enacted massive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last summer, is already estimated to funnel more than $1 trillion to the top 1% of earners over the next 10 years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
It is unclear whether Bessent would even have the power to change how gains are taxed without an act of Congress, or if Bessent has any interest in doing so. But the vast majority of the benefits from Cruz and Scott's proposal, if enacted, would likely go to the rich as well.
When the Trump administration first considered indexing capital gains taxes to inflation back in 2018, the Penn Wharton Budget Model projected that 63% of the benefits would flow to the richest 0.1%—those making tens of millions per year—while 86% would go to the top 1%.
Those in the bottom 90% of earners would see just over 2% of the overall benefits, with those in the bottom half receiving basically nothing.
According to the Post, the senators view lowering capital gains taxes as part of a GOP bid to "improve its economic approval rating with voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections," in which the party is expected to take a walloping, according to current polls.
Voters have not responded kindly to previous bills that handed lavish tax breaks to the rich. At the time of its passage, the OBBBA was one of the least popular pieces of legislation in modern history, with several polls showing nearly a 2-to-1 disapproval rating.
But Cruz and Scott are pushing for this policy change despite the public revulsion and the fact that the Department of Justice has previously ruled that the Treasury Department can't make policy without Congress' approval.
"Ted Cruz is asking the Treasury Department to break the law to give another round of tax breaks to the ultrarich," remarked Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. "These guys can't help themselves."
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'Enough Is Enough': Sanders, Khanna Propose Billionaires Tax to Raise $4.4 Trillion
"In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer."
Mar 02, 2026
The US economy has reached a breaking point, suggested Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday as he and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced legislation to force billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.
"We can no longer tolerate a corrupt tax code that enables billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than the average worker," said Sanders (I-Vt.) "In a democratic society, we cannot tolerate 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck—struggling to pay for housing, food, and healthcare—while 938 billionaires have become $1.5 trillion richer. We cannot continue a trend in which, over the past 50 years, $79 trillion in wealth in our country has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Enough is enough. Billionaires cannot have it all."
The taxes of fewer than 1,000 people in the US would be impacted by the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, but just a 5% annual wealth tax on those households would be able to raise an estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue over the next decade, said Sanders' office—a fact that underscores the immense wealth of the 938 billionaires who would be targeted by the bill.
Those 938 people have a collective net worth of $8.2 trillion, and Sanders and Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed out how the immense fortunes of some high-profile billionaires would be affected by the bill.
According to the lawmakers, Tesla CEO and President Donald Trump ally Elon Musk, whose $833 billion net worth makes him richer than the bottom 53% of US households, would owe $42 billion in taxes—an unfathomable amount to the vast majority of Americans, but a comparatively tiny tax bill for Musk, who would be left with about $792 billion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would each owe just $11 billion compared to their $220 billion and $218 billion net worth.
The wealth of billionaires has risen rapidly in recent years, increasing by about 20% in 2025, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
“We have a deep economic divide in this country. On one side, places like Silicon Valley are generating extreme wealth. On the other side, families are struggling to cover the cost of healthcare, housing, and basic needs," said Khanna. "We can tax billionaires a modest amount to make sure everyone has a fair chance while keeping our innovative engine. That is why I am proud to join Sen. Bernie Sanders to lead the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act."
With the revenue collected from the wealth tax, said Sanders and Khanna, the federal government would:
- Provide a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less;
- Reverse the $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which are estimated to cause more than 50,000 unnecessary deaths;
- Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for millions of seniors;
- Build, rehabilitate, and preserve over 7 million affordable homes to eliminate the affordable housing gap and end homelessness;
- Ensure no family pays more than 7% of their income on childcare;
- Establish a $60,000 minimum annual salary for every public school teacher in America; and
- Expand Medicaid home health care for seniors and people with disabilities.
Khanna and Sanders emphasized that "no one who has a net worth of less than $1 billion would pay a penny more in taxes under this bill."
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at University of California, Berkeley, released an analysis Monday that found the bill "would raise approximately $4.4 trillion over a decade and close the gap between wealth growth for billionaires and income growth for the average American family that has existed since the early 1980s."
"Democracies become oligarchies when wealth becomes too concentrated," said the economists. "The US has now reached an unprecedented level of top wealth concentration. US billionaire wealth has exploded in recent years, more than doubling since 2019. A billionaire wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth among the billionaire class in the United States."
"Combining top wealth taxation with policies to rebuild middle class economic security," said Saez and Zucman, "is what the United States needs to ensure vibrant and equitable growth for the future."
As Jeff Stein wrote at the Washington Post, the proposal of a wealth tax—which is supported by roughly two-thirds of Americans, according to polls—could become a litmus test in the 2028 presidential election, in which Khanna has been named as a potential candidate.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also been named as a possible Democratic contender and has expressed vehement opposition to a billionaire tax that's been proposed in his state, putting him at odds with about 90% of Democratic voters there and three-quarters of all Californians.
Sanders—who supports the California measure—said that "it is time to enact a wealth tax on billionaires and use this revenue to address some of the major crises facing working families, the children, the elderly, the sick, and the most vulnerable.”
“At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality," he said, "this legislation demands that the billionaire class in America finally pay their fair share of taxes so that we can create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%."
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