How Politicians from Dakota Adapted to Trump's Management Style

MITCHELL, South Dakota — Earlier this month, two of Washington’s biggest Republican powers in waiting, each hailing from among the smallest two states in the country, encountered one another in Washington’s Reagan National Airport.

“I said, ‘Hey, good luck,’” North Dakota Gov. and would-be vice president Doug Burgum recalled telling South Dakota’s would-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R). “It would be really cool if he could get that done.”

Then, Burgum recounted, Thune said to him: “‘I hope your race is going well.’ I’m like: ‘am I in a race? I know you’re in a race.’”

Dakota coy aside, both are very much locked in competitive contests. The outcome will have a million-acre-sized impact on the nation, their party and their humble but proud and booming though still slightly insecure region.

The Great Plains are poised to rise.

Should Donald Trump prevail, Burgum will be vice-president or land an administration post. Thune is the favorite to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell and lead a new GOP Senate majority. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem may land an appointment yet in Washington, despite her recent dog-killing travails.

Meanwhile, the other lawmakers from the capable and normie-filled Dakotas delegation, which includes two former governors, will wield influence on issues ranging from agriculture and energy to banking and national security. Oh, and Burgum’s almost certain successor, Representative Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), will arrive in Bismarck to lead his state at the end of this year with deeper connections in the nation’s capital than any modern North Dakota governor.

Just to the west, Wyoming’s senior senator, John Barrasso, is in line to be the second-ranking Senate Republican. Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who as head of the Senate GOP campaign arm this year has largely preempted contentious primaries, could become one of the most influential lawmakers in Washington. That’s thanks to his relationships with Trump and Thune — and the wings of the party each represents — as well as his perch on the tax-writing Finance Committee.

Trump has nudged Daines to consider challenging Thune for leader. However, I’m told by multiple Republicans that the Montanan has already pledged to support his neighbor in South Dakota — and that Daines under a Leader Thune will have a carved-out leadership role harnessing the former Proctor & Gamble executive’s business chops as well as his political savvy and Trump friendship.

“There’s going to be a leadership spot for Steve when it’s all said and done,” Senator Mike Rounds, South Dakota’s junior senator and Thune’s leading ally, told me.

Taken together, it’s an imposing array of force from such a sparsely populated corner of the country. Until Montana’s growth recently netted them a second seat, all four states were represented by an at-large House member.

More remarkable is how many of the leading Republicans from the region emerged in the pre-Trump era and, while submitting to varying levels of accommodation, have avoided the bomb-throwing style so many in their party have adopted to keep with current fashions. (The MAGA-obsessed Noem is the notable exception.)

“We’re normal,” said Rounds, adding: “It’s not a hard hard-right. We’re Ronald Reagan Republicans.”

Indeed, you could drop most of them in the GOP of 1984 or 2004 and they’d fit right in.

“We all kind of sound alike,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told me, and he wasn’t just referring to their straight-out-of-Fargo accents. “It’s tonal and if you watch Fox News, it doesn’t sound like us.”

What Johnson and so many of the other traditional Republicans from the region are wondering though, is how long can it last.

“Are we just lagging behind the populist change or are we going to continue to be different?” he asked. “That to me is the central question. And I don’t really know the answer.”

What I’m more immediately interested in if Republicans do take over Washington next year is whether the “Prairie Pragmatists,” as Johnson calls them, will shape or simply be shaped by the Trump restoration.

Perhaps it’s not an either-or distinction. Maybe the more likely outcome is the same Trumpian chaos and bombast while the mild-mannered Scandinavians step cautiously and do what they do best: present as wholly guileless, doncha know, while they hustle furiously.

Burgum could have the most clout of them all and perhaps even rise to president himself one day.

After a stint at McKinsey, Burgum made his fortune by starting a company, Great Plains Software, and then selling it to Microsoft in 2001. His mother had served as an RNC committeewoman from North Dakota during President Richard Nixon’s first term, but Burgum didn’t take to politics until well after his business career took off.

He and Trump, two former businessmen who bulldozed their party establishments to win on their first tries for office in 2016, have forged a close friendship this year. The North Dakotan has emerged as perhaps the most reliable and certainly the busiest surrogate for the GOP nominee.

“I like him because he’s a business guy, maybe he likes me because I’m a business guy,” Burgum told me earlier this month over omelettes in Washington, where he was making one of his regular appearances on Trump’s preferred auditioning stage: Sunday shows. When I asked Burgum to explain his politics, and suggested he was no culture warrior, he said: “I’ll let other people describe them, but I’d say yes I’m a business guy.”

North Dakotans who knew Burgum before he was in politics are blunter.

“Doug was a moderate Republican,” former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) told me.

That label is not necessarily detrimental to Burgum’s hopes for being chosen. For all his incendiary rhetoric, Trump has time and again demonstrated he covets successful people who also convey the aura of success. If there’s a Trump personnel litmus test beyond loyalty to Trump, that’s it. And Burgum isn’t going to wear a garish tie or track mud in the club.

For all his wealth, though, the governor told me he’s reluctant to spend more of his fortune on Trump’s bid after pouring $12 million of his own money into his own failed presidential candidacy last year.

“I’m tapped out,” he said.

But what if Trump asked him to chip in?

“There are some things that are more valuable than money, and right now that’s time,” he said.

(In a more recent CNN interview, Burgum was less emphatic about not putting in his own money: “I think all of that is if we're asked, we'll see what happens.”)

Even if Burgum is passed over for vice president, he’s still well-positioned to be one of the most influential figures in a second Trump term.

“Donald Trump has personally asked me twice if I thought Doug Burgum would be a good Energy Secretary,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who’s close to Trump, told me.

Another possibility is Burgum serves as Interior Secretary, which has more influence over oil and gas exploration in addition to the National Park system, other federal lands and Native American tribes, all issues on which the governor is intensely engaged. Or he may land in the White House, as a top aide and calming peer and fellow rich guy influence on Trump.

It's heady stuff for the four states that emerged from what Congress established as the Dakota Territory in 1861, its capital moving along the steamship line up the Missouri River as the pioneers headed West and boats gave way to the Northern Pacific’s locomotives.

It’s particularly alluring for the Dakotans who share the lowest unemployment rate of any states in the country, 2 percent, but lack the glitzy resort towns, Lululemon-clad seasonal residents and hit TV shows of their more mountainous neighbors.

That owes in part to their frustrations about not being taken more seriously by the coasts, but also because it promises such a change from the modern Republican Party, which, particularly in the Senate, has carried a Southern accent.

When Senator John Hoeven (R-N.D.) arrived in Washington in 2011, induced to relinquish his third term as governor with the promise of a seat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, his staff would marvel at the power of the Southerners, a former aide told me. It was easy to glimpse in the caucus lunches, with Kentucky’s McConnell at the helm, and even more so on the Appropriations panel, which was dominated by veterans such as Mississippi’s Thad Cochran and Alabama’s Richard Shelby.

The Dakotans in Hoeven’s office had a name for it — “the seersucker culture.”

That was then.

“Yah sure, you betcha we could change the accent,” Burgum joked, embracing the premise, making fun of himself and an outsider’s line of inquiry all at the same time in peak Plains fashion.

This was not my first trip to the Dakotas. That’s important to know because Dakotans usually ask if it is, brace for the answer and try to both balm and monetize their frustration by handing out I-made-my-50th state awards and souvenirs.

Those ranks include one prominent television journalist, who last summer got Burgum’s hopes up about his short-lived presidential bid by trekking to North Dakota.

“I thought, ‘Hey our campaign is really taking off, Chuck Todd is coming,’ and he got there and he’s like, ‘Hey, It’s my 50th state, and I’m retiring,’” Burgum told me, adding a sad trombone line: “We gave him a t-shirt and proclamation.”

I had been to the Dakotas before because there were competitive general elections here not long ago. Democrats dominated the federal delegations, and many hung on, by dint of their talent, relationships and a politics yet to be wholly nationalized well after both Dakotas were defined as merely part of “red America.”

Until after the 2010 midterms, five of the six lawmakers from the two states were Democrats. The only Republican was Thune, who lost a 2002 Senate bid narrowly before his historic defeat of Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in 2004. If you include Montana, five of the six senators from the three states were Democrats until 2011.

In fact, the best recent comparison to what the region may enjoy next year is a generation ago: When Daschle was the Democratic Senate majority leader, Dorgan and his fellow North Dakotan Kent Conrad enjoyed seniority, and Montana’s Max Baucus had even more. Yet that was under divided government, and namely a GOP White House more likely to pressure the Democratic lawmakers then do them any favors.

As Johnson pointed out as we sat in Mitchell, the hometown he shares with George McGovern, three of the most prominent Senate Democrats of the last 75 years emerged from the James River valley of South Dakota: Daschle, McGovern and Hubert Humphrey, the son of Doland, South Dakota’s pharmacist.

In any event, I had never traveled both Dakotas like this, a four-day trek across both states akin to Lewis & Clark but in an SUV loaded with ample podcasts. Driving 1,174 miles, killing at least as many bugs in the process and taking in walleye, on the hook and the plate, as well as Chislic and Knoephla, I wanted to know more about Burgum and what the future could hold for the farms, ranches, bases, Bakken, tech parks and especially the tourist hustles that drive the economy here.

The two states have much in common. They gained statehood in the same moment, with President Benjamin Harrison covering up their names as he signed the 1889 law so as to obscure which state came in first.

Both were settled by mostly Germans and Scandinavians, and the population center of each is anchored on their eastern edge, even though both capitals sit on the Missouri River in the middle of the two states. That same river also serves as the de facto dividing line between the farm-dominated Midwest and the hill and butte-filled ranches of the West. With some exceptions, the Vikings are king are in the east while the Broncos reign once you cross into the Mountain time zone.

There are also key differences and an active sibling rivalry.

“We’re brothers and sisters, but we are very different in one aspect,” Cramer boasted. “We have a lot of energy, and they have almost none.”

North Dakota also has a deeper populist history, still retaining a state bank and state mill, while South Dakota is winning out, for now, on the tourism trade.

Most significant of all for their political interests, the two states are led by an interwoven group of Republicans.

Cramer and Thune were both executive directors of their respective state Republican parties — “the two youngest state directors in the history of their states and the country at the time,” Hoeven noted.

In the 2000s, when Hoeven was still North Dakota’s governor, he and Thune had an hours-long conversation that began when Thune tried to recruit Hoeven to run for the Senate and ended with Hoeven pushing Thune to run for governor.

And in North Dakota, Armstrong, Cramer and Hoeven, as well as former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, all live along the Missouri River within a few miles of each other near Bismarck.

My original idea was to meet Burgum in Medora. That’s the western North Dakota town that is akin to Teddy Roosevelt Disney today, replete with frontier-era downtown, a western musical show at night and the only national park named for a person, sprawling across the Badlands.

It's also where Burgum is determined to build Roosevelt’s presidential library, a passion project of his which helps explain the governor and the state he leads. The goal: open the library two years from July, on America’s 250th birthday.

“I thought honestly it was the one thing that would keep him in office for four more years, he’s that obsessed,” said Cramer, alluding to Burgum’s decision about running for a third term. “Talk about a guy who gets laser focused.”

This would be a good moment to note that most of the Dakotans are charmingly candid and, God love ’em, conditioned to say what’s on their mind. While Hoeven is the most restrained of the bunch, at least with the press, Cramer is the bluntest.

To wit, his assessment of Burgum: “He's probably on the spectrum, but he is not an uninteresting guy — he can go from the castration of calves and branding in southwest North Dakota to the next greatest thing at Microsoft.”

Little, though, gets Burgum more energized than discussing Medora. It’s partly because of his roots.

Burgum’s family was one of the first to settle North Dakota, before statehood, and the governor himself is remarkably close to that history, even in 2024: Burgum’s grandmother, the first woman to attend North Dakota State University, marched as a teenager in an 1880s July 4 parade in Bismarck that also featured Sitting Bull.

The governor has, quite literally, chased potential library donors across the world.

On a visit to the American Embassy in Tokyo two years ago, Burgum got wind that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon would be in town soon after. As the governor recounted to me, he got Ambassador Rahm Emanuel in on the effort. Emanuel gave Burgum embassy letterhead and had the governor write out a note, vowing to put it on Dimon’s pillow.

Burgum is fixated on getting the House of Morgan to pony up because of the historical symmetry between the two men, J.P. Morgan and TR.

“'We’re not going to have a display with J.P. Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt sponsored by Wells Fargo, that’s why I’ve been chasing you for years,'" he recalled telling Dimon when they eventually spoke.

This being the Dakotas, there’s also a financial motive to building the library. You don’t survive in the forbidding northern Plains without devising ways to lure people and profit. And, well, the North Dakotans are fed up with losing tourist dollars to the South Dakotans.

Burgum recalled with barely hidden irritation a lifetime of conversations with people who say something along the lines of: Oh, North Dakota, I stopped there on a road trip in college.

He’d invariably ask where they went, and they’d invariably answer: Mt. Rushmore.

“Oh, you went to South Dakota, you were on I-90,” Burgum would say.

I-90 took people west, past the Mitchell Corn Palace (ka-ching), past Wall Drug (ka-ching) and onto Rushmore (ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching) and the surrounding Black Hills towns of Custer, Deadwood, Spearfish and the marvelous, bison-filled Custer State Park. (That’s where McGovern, using a brief holiday at the lodge to promote the region to the national press in oh-so-Dakotan fashion following his 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, ruminated over dumping Thomas Eagleton from the ticket.)

I-90 is also the route so many tourists on their Great American Roadtrip continued to take west, onto Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and beyond to the Big Horns, Tetons and the biggest hustle, er attraction, of them all: Yellowstone.

Missing in all this: North Dakota.

They know, because the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library backers have commissioned studies on how many more visitors the library can lure. It’s 185,000-283,000 on top of the nearly 250,000 people who already visit Medora each year. They’ve hired Washington lobbyists. And they’ve gotten federal and state dollars authorized. One of Burgum’s proteges and longest-serving aides, Robbie Lauf, is helping to build the library.

The goal: create a tourism triangle in the region to bring road-trippers north.

“It’s pretty simple,” said Burgum, “You got Teddy and some other guys face on the rock in South Dakota, you got the beautiful national park [Yellowstone] and then you’re going to have this library, which is going to be the most visited and most incredible presidential library in the whole system, overlooking the National Park where he forged himself.”

Yes, South Dakotans, you heard that: “some other guys face on the rock.”

Still, there’s clearly something deeper to Burgum’s commitment than just getting a larger slice of the tourist action.

I asked Burgum if he saw himself in TR, another garrulous son of a prominent family who preferred the strenuous life over the leisurely one his wealth could afford.

After talking around it a bit, the governor revealed that “years before this library idea ever came up, I had the ‘In The Arena’ quote hanging in my office as an entrepreneur.”

You know the one: “It is not the critic who counts,” but rather “the man who is actually in the arena.”

Lots of Americans can relate to those lines, Burgum said, but when he alluded to today’s critics as “keyboard warriors” I got a sense for how the quote resonates for him.

I got the same sense when I asked him if he thought being from a lightly populated state hurt him in his presidential run last year.

“Not just a small state because of the specific state,” he said, before lamenting how few reporters had been to North Dakota, much less knew anything about its economy or culture.

Then, he got closer to the bone, recounting how people usually respond to those they meet from Wyoming or Montana — “so beautiful!” — before reciting the reaction he often gets about his home: “North Dakota must be cold.”

This prompts reference to another longstanding Burgum pet project: dropping the “North” and renaming the state “Dakota.”

As he puts it: “’Dakota’ is a beautiful word, ‘North’ is a real handicap.”

Burgum promoted the change when he was still in the business world, gave it up once he became governor and is now ready to pick up the cause once more.

“As I’m heading out the door, I would absolutely say it would be a smart, smart move” to change the state’s name to just Dakota. As for any confusion with their neighbors below, well, Burgum used the moment to get in another jab.

“They’re not going to drop ‘South’ because it’s so balmy in South Dakota, it’s so warm, it’s like beaches,” he snarked.

Throughout our conversation, Burgum was guarded on the topic of vice president. He did, though, allow his pride to break through when he dismissed the electoral knock on him.

“’He's from a small state, three electoral votes,’” Burgum said, aping those keyboard warrior critics, before firing back: “What state is Joe Biden from?”

JFK picking LBJ, and the ticket carrying Texas, was the last time a running mate’s state played a key role in winning the White House, Burgum said before sarcastically noting yet another recent example of a vice president from a small population state: “Cheney pulled in Wyoming.”

Naturally, Burgum only gushes about Trump. What he meant to North Dakota as president, what he could mean to the country if he’s president again and the hard-working and funny side of the man he has seen since endorsing him before the Iowa caucuses at the start of the year.

It's a far cry from the person who last year said he wouldn’t do business with Trump and two years ago flatly told Fargo talk show host Joel Heitkamp he would not run with Trump. (Heitkamp, a former Democratic state senator and the younger brother of the former senator is having a ball with the Burgum veepstakes and posted a series of clips for the media under the header: “Hope This Helps.”)

Even some North Dakota Republicans wonder how such an assertive and verbose executive would fare as anybody’s second, but especially Trump, who craves center stage like the walleyes in the Missouri chase worms: impulsively and instinctively.

“Knowing Trump a little and Doug well, that could cause some angst in Doug from time to time,” former Gov. Ed Schafer said of Burgum being Trump’s vice president.

Schafer, whose father used his fortune from founding Mr. Bubble to first restore Medora in the 1960s, worried out loud that Burgum being “tied at the hip to Donald Trump doesn’t give you a good start in 2028.”

If Burgum is “doing this to be president, he’s better in the cabinet,” said the former governor, because as vice-president, Burgum would have to be “a mini Donald Trump.”

Another former North Dakota governor, Jack Dalrymple, is more bullish on his successor as Trump’s vice-president, even if he doesn’t make the case as Burgum would prefer it.

Trump, said Dalrymple, “needs a guy like Burgum” to demonstrate “there is substance” on the ticket.

It was hard to miss Dalrymple’s admiration for Burgum.

“He has this vision of, ‘If you build it, they will come’ kinda thing,” he said of Burgum. “I’m more of a show me kinda guy, show me how this works again. But [Burgum] believes in something, he goes for it.”

It may seem odd for a small-town kid whose family owned a grain elevator, but if there’s anything that draws out Burgum more than Teddy Roosevelt it’s urban planning. Yes, you read that right. A clip of his from a National Governors Association session praising walkability and the need to mix the commercial and residential went viral with the YIMBY crowd earlier this year.

Burgum played a pivotal role with his own money in transforming downtown Fargo, which now has two hip hotels and all manner of restaurants, coffee shops and, thankfully, still retains the Sons of Norway lodge with its electronic marquee: “Velkommen to all!”

It's a long way from 1996, when the movie Fargo came out, coincidentally the same time Burgum was taking his software company public and hearing the same refrain at every pitch meeting.

“100 percent of the first question was about the movie,” he recalled. “We had no paper shredders in our office, only woodchippers, we’d answer with a straight face. They’d say: ‘Really?!’”

On the matter of how he could use a position with Trump to help the Dakotas, Burgum was, understandably, restrained. There was lots of: what’s good for the region will be good for America.

Burgum did, though, point out that North Dakota is facing “over 30 rules and mandates from a dozen different [federal] agencies.”

To say Trump would bring a light touch on the regulations that constrain an oil-and-gas state is to put it mildly.

Cramer can already envision the initial months.

“To the degree we can codify a new regime, if you will, you can do a lot in a short period of time — a whole lot: drilling on federal lands, pipelines, permitting stuff,” he said.

Same on the agriculture front. Biden-era regulations from the EPA and beyond would be quickly scrapped, the Dakotans predicted.

And if lawmakers can’t get the farm bill done this year, well, Hoeven is on the Agriculture Committee and would have the gavel of the Appropriations panel’s Ag subcommittee.

There’s another shared interest between the two states: Air Force bases. North Dakota has Minot and Grand Forks while South Dakota has Ellsworth, near Rapid City.

Minot is home to two of the three legs of the nuclear triad — “the only dual nuclear base in the country,” Hoeven reminded me — between its ICBMs and its B-52s. Ellsworth has the new B-21, a cutting edge stealth bomber. In the Space Force and unmanned drone age, Grand Forks is increasingly relevant for its Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance capabilities and the way it links the other two bases when wars are increasingly fought from the skies.

Then there’s the bounty that comes with a seat at the leadership table, whether in Congress or the White House: patronage. The Dakotans would be able to garner a number of appointments and judgeships, posts they’ve been eager to fill once they hit that sweet spot of seniority, congressional majorities and a GOP president.

So how is it, at a time when many conservative-leaning states have turned to provocateurs, the Dakotas have kept electing a group of “common-sense, down-to-earth lawmakers,” as Hoeven called them?

Well, first there is an outlier. Noem, who was a Kevin McCarthy ally in the House before winning the governorship in 2018, has reinvented herself to become Trumpier and win Fox News invites. Revealingly, though, it hasn’t helped her standing at home: her polling slipped even before she used a memoir to reveal she killed her dog.

As one North Dakota Republican put it to me, for all his popularity from afar Trump “couldn’t win a governor’s race here.” Politics is too personal, and he wouldn’t wear well.

Johnson said Dakota politics demands a level of decency because “the people in the line ahead of us at the coffee shop aren’t strangers” and there’s “not anonymity” here for politicians.

And as if to prove his point, an older couple, GOP activists from the Sioux Falls area, happened to stop at the Mitchell Starbucks as the congressman and I talked. Johnson recalled having just seen them at the state Republican convention earlier in the month. (Also on brand: After introductions were made, the woman urged me not to “sell South Dakota short,” calling it a “hidden gem,” to which her husband cautioned: “We don’t want too many people here.”)

There’s also a dexterity required of politicians here. Most are all on the heels of talented Democrats and know their voters expect results and personal attention.

“People expect that we’re going to solve something,” North Dakota’s Republican Attorney General Drew Wrigley told me. “It’s not enough to be complaining.”

It's not hard, though, to detect foreboding about what tomorrow’s voters may demand. I was in the region shortly before North Dakota’s primary, and there was evident nervousness about the race to succeed Armstrong for the state’s at-large House seat.

Revealingly, when I asked Burgum if he had a group text thread with the state’s congressional delegation, he said it had been dominated of late by “how do we get Julie elected.”

That’s Julie Fedorchak, a public service commissioner and former Schafer aide, who wound up winning the primary handily over a would-be Freedom Caucus member. However, that only happened after an intervention by Cramer and Burgum to get Trump to endorse Fedorchak.

That’s a neat encapsulation of the oh-so-tenuous bargain in GOP politics today: co-opt Trump to tamp down the forces of Trumpism.

Should Trump win, it will almost certainly be the approach Rounds takes two years from now should Noem run against him in a primary.

And it’s the same game Thune is forced to play today in his leadership bid. After breaking with Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thune has had to rekindle a relationship with the former president in order to be viable in the race to succeed McConnell.

It has not come easily for the South Dakotan and has required the help of intermediaries, including Cramer and Sens. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Cramer recounted how Graham stage-managed Thune’s endorsement of Trump earlier this year, naturally on the golf course. In between holes with Trump, Graham got Thune on the phone. “‘Oh, John, yeah, say, here’s the president you should talk to him,’” Cramer recalled of how the not-so-impromptu détente went down.

This ride-the-tiger-to-tame-him approach is ultimately the promise Burgum’s enthusiasts see in him, too. Not that they’d dare put it that way.

Yet you can hear the argument when Armstrong extolled Burgum.

“The single biggest reason I hope he becomes VP is because he doesn’t believe the cure to the heavy hand of liberal government is the heavy hand of conservative government,” the North Dakota congressman told me, contrasting Burgum with the party’s “populists who want to weaponize government.”

And when Cramer made his bottom-line case for Burgum, well, let’s just say the Dakotans have a way of getting to the point.

“Even though he’s a middle-aged white guy who seems to add zero value to the ticket, when people get to know him he does add that calming factor, that competence factor, that non-chaotic factor that maybe people go: ‘Ok, it’s ok — we’ll be ok.’”

Ben Johansen contributed to this report.