This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Last November's election shook things up in the White House, Congress and the South Dakota Legislature. This month, state and national politicians settle into their posts.
Our Dakota Political Junkies explore how Rep. Dusty Johnson is making his voice heard in the U.S. House. They also look at other political power players in the new administration, including billionaire Elon Musk.
Lisa Hager, Ph.D., is an associate professor of political science at South Dakota State University, and David Wiltse, Ph.D., is a professor of political science at the university.
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The following transcript was edited for clarity.
Lori Walsh:
President-elect Donald Trump, the businessman, is involving other billionaires in his administration, including Elon Musk.
But when does the pace of business collide with the pace of American democracy?
Also, a look at the political influence of South Dakotans, John Thune, Kristi Noem and Dusty Johnson in a new Trump administration.
For our Dakota Political Junkies conversation today, we are welcoming Lisa Hager, associate professor of political science at SDSU, and Dave Wiltse, professor of political science at SDSU. We connected from SDPB's Jeanine Basinger studio in Brookings, and we will begin here with the certification of the election.
Vice President Kamala Harris:
The votes for President of the United States are as follows, Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes. Kamala D. Harris—
[Applause]
Lisa Hager:
So when we have that certification process taking place, we have the folks who are casting those electoral votes actually going to their statehouse capitols to cast those votes, and then of course we have that election being certified in Congress with the vice president presiding over that.
And so obviously we got really a first row seat to that on January 6th when the insurrection took place, something that most people don't even really think about, but there it really got thrust into the spotlight. So now when we talk about it, people have a little bit better idea of what's actually taking place than maybe they would. But of course it's been a while, so we probably did forget.
David Wiltse:
It's good to be back to boring.
Lori Walsh:
It's good to be back to boring.
And that brings me to my next question, which is who gets to decide what narrative is taking root about what happened on January 6th, four years ago?
Because you see a lot of headlines where the President-elect says it was a day of peace and love, and then other people say this was a day of violence and insurrection, and there is a battle over how it will be remembered.
Dave, tell me what you're seeing in the press and why that matters.
David Wiltse:
Well, as far as who's going to control the narrative, the quick answer to that is no one yet. We're in this era now where there— What do we call it? The post-truth era of politics, where the narrative is going to be whoever is controlling a particular forum and a particular realm of the internet or the realm of the information ecosystem.
And because we are now so sorted on ideology and partisanship when it comes to our news consumption and who we're listening to, there's just going to be two distinct realities here.
One is the peace and love. The other is this is an example of an insurrection. So no one's going to control this.
We'd like to say it'll be settled in history. Who knows? And we're probably all going to be dead by the time any kind of settled understanding of what happened four years ago is established.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Yeah, how long does it matter for, 20 years, 50 years, two years? It's been four years, and it still matters a great deal.
David Wiltse:
Right. Yeah. And there's no telling how long this current degree of polarization, this degree of separation on these basic factual occurrences is going to last.
We don't know how acute this polarization will stay. So it's anybody's guess.
Lori Walsh:
All right. I want to talk a little bit about Elon Musk because Donald Trump himself is a businessman and ran on this idea that the government is clunky and slow and should operate more like a business.
And I remember Ross Perot running and saying the same thing. So many people have talked about it.
Remember that movie "Dave," where they kind of joke around about coming to the White House, and "Hey, if I ran my business like this, it would go bankrupt"?
["Dave" movie clip]:
"You got to cut the budget."
"Yeah, about $650 million."
"I'll tell you, Dave, I've been over this stuff a bunch of times. It just doesn't add up. Who does these books? If I ran my business this way, I'd be out of business."
Lori Walsh:
American democracy runs at a certain pace for a certain reason. So when you see the insertion of someone like Elon Musk or a Mark Zuckerberg, "move fast and break things," private companies can fail in a way that the American government is not traditionally allowed to fail.
What lies at the intersection between a Musk-like innovation and disruption and what we understand about federal agencies and how they work in our lives?
David Wiltse:
Well, we had a businessman become president before. Herbert Hoover was a very successful businessman and a disaster of a president. This is not a new sentiment within the American polity, that if someone is successful in business and leading a large organization in the private sector, those skills should be able to transfer right over to the public sector, and it's clear that they don't.
And in this particular case, I don't expect it to go any better or any worse than any other administration, honestly.
What is a little bit different here is the kind of businessmen that we're beginning to attract. Musk is not the same sort of businessman that Herbert Hoover was or some of these other big captains of industry when they would wield their influence back in the 19th century. He's something new, and he's something a little different.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Lisa, what are you watching for in the first, say 100 days of President-elect Trump's administration regarding Elon Musk?
Lisa Hager:
I would just like to see what actually ends up taking shape in terms of the DOGE department that is getting created and what they actually bite off in terms of government efficiency and what they go after.
Because watching what's going on on X, formerly known as Twitter — I can't get away from calling it Twitter — but just kind of seeing the chatter on there because Elon always shows up in your feed. And frankly, I do want to see it just for things like this, but it's really dominating my feed at a certain extent.
But I think so far, I've seen just a lot of different things getting talked about. And so I'm really curious to see what he actually goes after and the method in which he goes after it. Because with what I've seen so far on X, there's this constant talk about things like, for instance, the daylight savings time.
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Lisa Hager:
And there's not even a real discussion of what they're landing on. Do we stay on standard time? Do we stay on daylight savings time? It's just this talk about how it's inefficient, and for lack of a better word, they didn't say this, but dumb, that we're wasting time moving our clocks forward and back.
Lori Walsh:
Sure.
Lisa Hager:
But again, there's been no real plan. What are we going to do? What does that look like? So that's what I'm looking for.
David Wiltse:
And these political neophytes, they're going to bump into some really hard political realities. To get the degree of cuts that they are advertising right now, they're going to bite into a lot of very important programs, important programs politically.
And it's something that's going to transcend partisanship to an extent because we're talking about major redistributive programs that Americans across the board are reliant upon, and that politicians of both parties have basically settled on that we need to keep spending in these areas. So as they bump into some of these entrenched interests in Congress, some of the important players in the appropriations process, they're going to have a hard time, especially with as narrow of majority that they have in the House right now.
Lori Walsh:
All right, let's talk about that narrow majority in the House because much has been made about Senator John Thune moving into that Senate majority leader position, but there in the House, U.S. Representative Dusty Johnson has become something of a deal maker and in Speaker Johnson's inner circle.
Lisa, what have you noticed about the positioning of Dusty Johnson?
Lisa Hager:
Just exactly what you said in the sense that he is there, he's in the mix, and he's continuing to do what he talks about a lot, which is actually being a workhorse, wanting to get things accomplished, wanting to work with folks within the party, but also realizing the reality of politics where you do need to at times work across the aisle to try to get some actual solutions to policy problems.
And that contrast to what he always says is some folks who want to be show horses.
And so I think that's something that's really worth pointing out, is that he's not only taken that approach to Washington D.C., but he's implemented it well and effectively so that he's in the mix for things like the speaker vote and moving forward with trying to tackle some of the things on President Trump's agenda, because seen him talking to a variety of reporters recently where he's talking about how it's important for them to form a coalition of folks who can actually move things through.
David Wiltse:
Despite Johnson being relatively new to the House, he really is a true institutionalist. This is a guy who believes in Congress's ability to do good policy work. He understands the institution better than most people elected from about the time he got in until today.
And to put it tersely, there might be 219 Republicans in the house, but an increasing number of them are just not adults when it comes to governance. They're more content throwing bombs, posting stuff on Twitter that are just incendiary and the like.
And Johnson does not play that kind of politics. He is an old-fashioned politician in the sense that he thinks the institution is in a position to help people, and he's going to do it, but he's still ideologically very much in line with Johnson and the bulk of Republicans.
And when Johnson is looking for people to be allies that can help with routine procedural votes, he's going to rely on people like Johnson who are serious about governing and serious about the institution.
Lori Walsh:
So how meaningful is it that South Dakota's Rep. Johnson, South Dakota's Sen. John Thune, and now South Dakota's governor potentially ending up being Secretary of Homeland Security, that those levers of power all connected?
They know each other. They've had their problems with each other, but by and large, they seem to want to work together, and they work well together. I'm not saying it's unprecedented, but it's certainly noteworthy.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, I can't think of another example quickly offhand of where you have a representative and a senator from a single state both in such important leadership positions. Clearly, South Dakota is punching above its weight right now. And throw in what kind of influence Gov. Noem will have as Homeland Security Secretary, that's a pretty impressive slate of characters that we're getting in good spots in Washington, D.C.
Lisa Hager:
And I would just add that I think it's noteworthy in the sense that if you look at other states, especially on the House side, they have a delegation of congressmen and congresswomen who can really work together, bounce ideas off, try to kind of see what are the others in their state doing. As someone who worked in Congress, there was constantly this conversation about what others from the state and the party, or even just the others in the state are doing.
And that's something that Dusty Johnson doesn't have. He is the at-large representative for South Dakota and Congress, so he doesn't have this natural group of congresspeople that he can work with. So he really has to forge his own way with these folks who are more ideologically similar and approach policymaking the same way as him.
So to see him not only forging a path for himself but really becoming a key person in Congress is pretty important to watch.
Lori Walsh:
All right, let's talk about Governor Kristi Noem. We're probably going to see a confirmation hearing yet in January. What are some of out of the gate questions that she's going to have to answer when she goes in front of that committee?
Lisa Hager:
I think some of it could just initially be questions that would give her a chance, especially from Republicans, to talk about her qualifications and her vision in terms of homeland security, which I suspect is going to largely center around questions of immigration and securing the southern border. And so I think from the Republican's point of view, it'll be a chance to give her an opportunity to talk.
Democrats, they're most likely just going to use their questions as a way to position take for their constituents so that they can clip out their question, post it on social media, and say that they're trying to show the other side of what's happening. They're not really going to end up having a huge impact on what happens overall in terms of her occupying that cabinet position, but they're going to use it more as a chance for them to state their views.
David Wiltse:
Yeah, this will probably be the most fluid and easiest of the nominations that Trump has announced so far, and I think the same thing could probably be said of Senator Rubio as well. These are just bog standard nominations in terms of cabinet positions.
Lori Walsh:
Do you think Democrats though are going to waste the opportunity to point out the lack of experience in leading multiple agencies versus being governor of South Dakota with a fairly small population, that they're going to pull things out of her book about her foreign policy experience, that they have been problematic and have been in the press before? Democrats aren't going to miss that chance, are they?
David Wiltse:
They won't miss it, but in the end, like Lisa said, it's mostly going to be for position-taking for their own rhetorical purposes. Because in the end, this nomination, unless something just completely unpredictable happens, is probably going to sail through without much of an issue.
Lori Walsh:
What does she need to do in the first 100 days? When you're talking about the southern border, what does success look like in the first 100 days? This is a very complicated problem.
Lisa Hager:
Yeah, no, it definitely is. And I think from Trump's point of view, from his administration's point of view, it's going to be really curbing the amount of folks that are crossing the border. I think it's going to be literally what's happening at the border and how many people are coming in.
I think, obviously, there's more discussions that need to take place regarding folks who are already going through different processes relating to asylum, for instance.
I think there's other questions about what's going to happen with folks who are undocumented that are currently in the country.
But I think realistically, right away, they're going to be trying to do more at the border, and then tackling some of these other issues.
David Wiltse:
Allow me to play the cynic for a moment. First of all, they got a great head start. We're now at one of the lowest points in terms of illegal border crossings in the past four or five years. A lot of it is just going to be managing perceptions and taking largely symbolic positions and rules and whatever policies that they can form under executive authority alone.
In the end, unfortunately, governance, especially in Trump's first administration, and most likely in his second, is going to come down to these kinds of impressions and making sure that their supporters are feeling that he is accomplishing everything that he to in the campaign. It's just the state of governance right now.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And with some razor-thin margins in the house, for example, those impressions might be hard to solidify as well because getting the job done is not easy.
David Wiltse:
Right. The studies on congressional elections, particularly House elections, the outcome, the aggregate outcome of House elections is so dependent upon presidential popularity. So they're working on a razor-thin margin right now, two votes, and they need to have as successful and as popular of a president as they can muster going into the midterm because they are vulnerable.
Lori Walsh:
All right.
Lisa Hager:
Well, and realistically, they'll lose seats at the midterm.
Lori Walsh:
Right. Yeah. So you don't have four years. You have a couple years, and the campaign's already begun.
Lisa Hager:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
David Wiltse:
We're talking midterm elections here, and it's so pinned on presidential popularity. So they are going to be doing everything they can to manage those expectations, to try and give the impression that they're doing everything that they said they would in the election to keep that base happy and to keep that base voting.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Well, we will look ahead to everything that's coming up and be in close contact with you as it does. So thanks so much for being here. We appreciate it.
Lisa Hager:
Yeah, thanks for having us.
David Wiltse:
Thanks.
