MAGA Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who was recently criticized for starring in a 5-minute promotional video for a cosmetic dentist in Texas, has also been campaigning for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. As seen below at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, Trump introduced her as a woman “who’s hot as a politician” and joked about not describing her as “beautiful.”
Thank you @realDonaldTrump! When you were president, I got to be on offense.
We need to send President Trump and Bernie Moreno to Washington to Make America Great Again! pic.twitter.com/YdoshbJqpT
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) March 17, 2024
While Noem asserted that President Joe Biden has made her job more challenging — with Trump in office she was “on offense,” she said, but now she’s “on defense” — there is at least one prominent issue that Noem and Biden agree on: the alleged danger of Americans using the social media app TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
[Note: On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill which calls for ByteDance to divest in TikTok or else the app will be banned from the U.S. President Biden said he would sign the bill if it passes in the Senate.]
Noem suggested on X: “Right now would be a great time to delete TikTok.”
Right now would be a great time to delete TikTok. pic.twitter.com/QTMSHVIvGs
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) March 17, 2024
On Greta Van Susteren’s Newsmax show, Noem warned that the Chinese-owned TikTok “may have ways of getting your contacts and your financial institutions, your banking apps.” She added, “We don’t know how extensive their penetration is into our lives because they don’t follow any rules. They are nefarious actors and they hate the United States of America.”
[Note: Trump has flip-flopped on the idea of banning TikTok. While in office, Trump tried to ban the app — then last week he said he opposed the ban and argued it would help Mark Zuckerberg and his social media platform, Meta, which suspended Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts “following his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”]
It’s a divisive issue: U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat representing Silicon Valley, voted against the TikTok ban bill. Khanna said the government should focus more on data privacy laws rather than ban the social media platform and risk violating Americans’ right to free speech.