Doug Burgum’s Rebranding: ‘He’s Playing the Game Now’

AMIDON, North Dakota— The rain had passed, and the June sun shined down on the Badlands. The pastures of John Hanson’s 11,000 acres ran green between the sandstone buttes that dotted the land. Hanson, sat in the back of an F-150 truck next to Beau Bateman. John’s kid brother Ted was driving, a rifle by his side. All three have been friends of Doug Burgum’s for nearly half a century. Hanson, dressed in a blue checked shirt, giant belt buckle, work jeans and tattered cowboy hat, had already put in a full day, but the most difficult task still lay ahead: explaining why their buddy would make a great vice president for former President Donald Trump.

“I voted for Trump in ’16,” John Hanson said. “I won’t tell you what I did in ’20. I’m not against his policies, but that wasn’t the way I was taught to lead. Doug doesn’t work that way.” We stopped the truck, and Hanson quickly checked on an innocent pine tree scorched by a lightning strike. “That tree’s dead,” said Hanson.

He returned to talking about his friend. “Doug has all this information in his head, and he listens to everyone. He knows how to lead.” He let out a snort of a laugh. “Maybe it will rub off.”

The data suggest otherwise. The number of Republicans in Trump’s first term who convinced themselves they could change Trump if only they could get into his inner sanctum was roughly equivalent to the legions of prairie dogs that populate the Hanson ranch. Many met the same metaphorical fate as the varmints the Hansons occasionally turn into red vapor with their rifles to protect their pastures.

The thing is Burgum isn’t even convincingly MAGA. Until recently Hanson’s buddy was a goateed software geek who spoke of gratitude, urban infrastructure and how abortion was none of his business. Now he was linking arms with a convicted felon who spoke in apocalyptic verse.

The sun was beginning to dip. Hanson tried to quell my doubts.

“Everyone asks: ‘How can Doug work with Trump?’” he said. “It’s a good question, but how about this? Don’t we want someone like Doug Burgum in the room if Trump goes off the rails and starts doing weird things?”

Hanson would have a point if this were, say, 2022-era Burgum, a business maverick known for nerdy inquisitiveness. But that guy is no longer available in stores. The new souped-up Burgum has been reimagined as a warrior for Trump. He now describes President Joe Biden as a dictator and a Hamas collaborator. He derides the American judicial system as a sham. This has all come as a shock to those in North Dakota who thought they knew him well. “Doug never played the game,” said Democratic state Rep. Josh Boschee, the first openly gay member of the North Dakota legislature, who has worked closely with Burgum on many issues. “He did his own thing, and, if anything, he changed the way the game was played.”

That was then. Once a dedicated follower of moderation, Burgum now is a late-in-life convert to the kill-or-be-killed political world as he focuses on becoming Trump’s vice presidential choice. While Hanson remains confident Burgum would be a restraint on Trump, others wonder what happened to their guy and whether Burgum has morphed into just another enabler. Boschee thinks he knows what happened.

“Doug started playing the game,” said Boschee.

The Hansons’ Logging Camp Ranch is Burgum’s “Rosebud,” the key to unlocking the essence of Burgum’s identity. He grew up 348 miles to the east in tiny Arthur where his family grew corn and owned the town’s only grain elevator. At 14, Burgum was pulled off a school bus and told his father had died from a brain tumor. He mastered high school, but something was missing. Burgum met Hanson on his first day at North Dakota State University in 1974.

“Doug had just tried to walk on to the football team and got clobbered,” Hanson told me. “I was roping a pipe in front of our dorm.”

The following spring, Hanson invited him out to the ranch for Memorial Day, the weekend every year when the family branded their young cattle. Hanson’s new friend spent the weekend getting steamrolled by 200-pound calves. Still, Burgum was hooked on the ranch life. (He now owns land adjacent to the Hanson property.) It wasn’t just the riding, branding and hunting that he loved, but the talks he had with John and Ted Hanson’s dad. Robert Lee Hanson, who somehow got The Wall Street Journal delivered to his remote ranch, filled a void in Burgum’s life. The elder Hanson urged Burgum to come back, joking, “Hang around here, and you might amount to something.”

Through the years, John Hanson tended his cattle and watched his friend move through the world: Stanford Business School, McKinsey and then a startup called Great Plains Software that was eventually sold to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, a Stanford friend, for $1.1 billion in 2001. Hanson’s buddy acquired some of the curious habits of the wealthy. He entered an extreme-sports phase, once showing up at the ranch with a polo player friend. He counted Bill Gates as a confidant. But one thing never changed. Burgum kept making his pilgrimage back to the ranch to bond and brand with the Hansons every Memorial Day weekend.

“I think he’s only missed two or three over 40 years,” said John Hanson. “It’s important to him.”

He missed this year. Burgum was too busy rebranding himself. Gone was the free-thinking innovator, replaced by a Trump apostle. Sure, Burgum had dutifully endorsed Trump after his own quixotic presidential campaign died before a single primary vote was cast. But instead of disappearing back home, Burgum became Trump’s body man. There was Burgum at Mar-a-Lago, playing an influential role in an April meeting with oil baron Harold Hamm and other energy executives. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times claimed Trump asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign in exchange for his loosening up oil regulations. (Burgum said on Face the Nation there was no quid pro quo. He declined to be interviewed for this story.) Since then, Burgum has appeared with Trump at a New Jersey rally where the former president touted his new best friend. “He made his money in technology, but he probably knows more about energy than anybody I know,” shouted Trump. Then he suggested an unknown magical future for Burgum: “So get ready for something, OK? Just get ready.”

Vice president? Secretary of Energy? Suddenly, Burgum was everywhere. There he was on San Francisco’s Billionaire Row en route to a Trump fundraiser. There he was wearing a Trump-red tie and standing behind the accused outside the Manhattan courthouse. On branding weekend, Burgum was 1,700 miles away at the North Carolina state convention in Greensboro trying to talk the talk of hardcore MAGA. I was there. How did it go? Not great.

Back in North Dakota, Hanson gave him an excused absence.

“It’s OK,” he said. “That takes priority.”

‘Why does Trump like him so much?’

T he Republican state convention in Greensboro seemed like a good place to begin my inquiry into Burgum; any audition for Trump starts with the contestant praising the former president in public.

By the time Burgum took the stage at dinner, much had already been said. Congressional candidate Mark Harris had declared his love for the late Jesse Helms, to great applause. The crowd also cheered for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction Michele Morrow, who once suggested that former President Barack Obama be executed on pay-per-view. That was all during the salad course.

Earlier, the crowd gave four standing ovations to a former 2024 presidential candidate who railed against “wokeism, transgenderism, climate-ism, Covidism, anti-Semitism and Zelenskyism.” Unfortunately for Burgum, that was Vivek Ramaswamy.

The hardcore Republican crowd has never been Burgum’s sweet spot, not even in his native state. In fact, many doubt whether he is actually a hardcore Republican. In 2008, he was spotted at the Alerus Center in Grand Forks listening to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton give speeches on the opening day of the North Dakota Democratic party convention. Burgum ran for governor in 2016 and won the GOP primary — the only vote that matters in North Dakota — with a coalition of conservatives, independents and crossover Democrats. Some progressives even held fundraisers for him.

Burgum refused to engage on third-rail conservative issues during that campaign. A local anchorman asked him in his first television interview after announcing his candidacy whether he was pro-life or pro-choice. He answered “Neither,” before adding: “All the people going to the edges hasn’t reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies.”

During the pandemic, Burgum tearfully begged on television for North Dakotans not to politicize the wearing of masks. This stood in contrast with his neighbor to the south, Gov. Kristi Noem, who flashed bravado while keeping indoor water parks open. After the 2020 election, Burgum made no snarky remarks about stolen elections and ordered flags flown at half-mast to honor the police who had fallen after the Jan. 6 violence. Two weeks later, Burgum was one of the few Republican governors to attend Biden’s inauguration, infamously boycotted by Trump.

This made North Carolina an away game for Burgum. He strode to the podium wearing a dark suit with a flag pin. Burgum is a Teddy Roosevelt stan — more on that later — particularly the years Roosevelt spent in the Badlands recovering after his wife and mother died on the same day. Burgum told the crowd about his pet project as governor.

“We are building a presidential library to Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota,” said Burgum. “It’s an audacious project, $400 million, a state-of-the-art presidential library.” He paused for effect. “In a town of 120 people.” The crowd laughed uncertainly. It seemed like a self-burn in front of a slash-government-spending crowd.

After a few forgettable “dad jokes,” he tried to address the James Stockdale (“Who am I, why am I here”) question. He giddily spoke of appearing with Trump at the rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. “I was with him in New Jersey when there were 107,000 people.” (Burgum has this part of the Trump audition down; Trump was the only other person claiming 107,000 people were there.) “People say, ‘Why are you going around the country, helping to campaign for President Trump?’ And I say, ‘I don’t want a single thing from President Trump other than he gets elected.’”

This would have been more believable this time last year during Burgum’s own short-lived presidential bid. The Burgum 2024 campaign was seen as a serious affair, fueled by tough talk on the link between energy production and national security. At that time, he exhibited little of the Trump crush that swept across the other Republican candidates. Burgum didn’t exactly “swift boat” Trump, but he did express his distaste — personally and as a matter of good politics. He told NBC’s Chuck Todd he would never do business with Trump; “It’s important that you are judged by the company you keep,” he said. In a radio interview, Burgum described Trump’s legal woes as “a giant distraction, and I think it hurts the party. We know we had issues down ticket in ’18, ’20 and ’22 related to some of these distractions, and I think it would be fantastic for the party if we could have a distraction-free 2024 election.”

On the stage, Burgum moved to the heart of his remarks, mainly that Biden has simultaneously made the United States both energy insecure and internationally weak. He lamented the burdensome regulations placed on energy production and submitted that North Dakota oil production is down because of Biden. (Obligatory fact check here: North Dakota production is actually up 10 percent between Biden’s inauguration and the end of 2023. State oil tax revenue is booming, kicking in over $1.5 billion in tax revenue for 2023, up from $1.3 billion in 2022. Oil production across the United States is also at an all-time high , not just for this country but for anywhere at any time in the history of the world.

But facts were not Burgum’s immediate problem.

The crowd was getting restless, some playing games on their phones, some stepping outside of the ballroom to talk. Perhaps realizing this, Burgum didn’t cut short his remarks, he just spoke faster. The crowd finally stood and gave him a Southern standing ovation send-off. He still trailed Ramaswamy by a field goal.

Burgum left without taking any questions. At first, I thought everyone was just burned out after three days of politicking and partying. But next up was North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who once suggested that Pearl Harbor was an inside job. The former preacher re-animated the base in moments. North Carolina Republicans wanted spicy mustard, and Burgum had given them Grey Poupon.

Afterward, I made my way back to my hotel room, which was across from a Robinson hospitality suite. I could overhear two Robinson supporters talking in the hallway about Burgum.

“I still don’t understand why he was here. Why does Trump like him so much? He was boring.”

The other had a thought.

“Maybe that’s why Trump likes him.”

‘He just flipped with the winds’

F or decades, you would run into Burgum on the streets of Fargo. Sporting a goatee and a modified mullet, Burgum would evangelize about how the key to a successful 21 ^st century American metropolis was a vibrant downtown. He might urge you to stop by his office and sit through his PowerPoint on the merits of walkable cities.

I didn’t see Burgum in Fargo, but not long after I arrived in North Dakota, a Burgum associate set up a meeting for me with Tami Reller, a longtime colleague. Reller, a first-generation college kid from Grand Forks, began working with Burgum at Great Plains Software while she was still at university and remained there through the Microsoft buyout in 2001. (Burgum stayed on another six years as a top Microsoft exec, commuting by private jet between Fargo and Seattle.) Reller has remained close to Burgum through the decades and ran the Doug Burgum for America PAC. We met in a pristine private dining room adjacent to a restaurant in the RDO Building, North Dakota’s second -tallest building.

I asked Reller whether she could remember an example of leadership Burgum showed at Great Plains other than the oft-told tale of how Burgum mortgaged the family farm for startup money.

She thought for a moment and then told me a story. Great Plains had a product release that turned out to be filled with glitches and problems. A few months later, at an annual meeting in Fargo, Burgum walked into the company’s auditorium to give a talk in front of the vendors, many who were steaming about the botched roll-out.

Burgum pulled out two eggs. He cracked them over his head.

“I have egg on my face,” said Burgum. Yolk ran down his cheeks, but he didn’t wipe it away. “We messed up, and we know how much this impacts you. We will make it right.”

“It wasn’t played for laughs,” Reller told me. “Doug wanted to take responsibility. He doesn’t avoid responsibility.”

It wasn’t until later that I learned that the RDO Building had been built by Burgum’s real estate company, the Kilbourne Group, which he started after he exited Microsoft. (Kilbourne is his mother’s maiden name.) Unlike Trump, Burgum had a reputation as a builder, not a hype artist (no Burgum Tower for him) and in a most un-Trump-like decision, he insisted that the RDO Building, at 18 stories, not surpass the capitol as the tallest building in North Dakota. The RDO is one of several buildings Burgum has built as part of a downtown revitalization, which is not to be confused with the buildings rehabbed by his ex-wife Karen, a local progressive who many told me was less than thrilled about her ex-husband’s embrace of Trump. (The couple had three children before divorcing in 2003. He remarried in 2016.)

Burgum’s enlightened entrepreneur reputation was one of the reasons why KFGO talk show host Joel Heitkamp met with Burgum and urged him to run for governor in 2016 as an independent. Heitkamp is a former Democratic state senator and the brother of Heidi Heitkamp, the former Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota. (Heidi Heitkamp is probably also the last Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota, as the state has morphed from populist Democrat to a get-off-my farm/ranch/cul-de-sac form of Trumpism.)

“I knew we needed a progressive businessman to move us forward, and the Democrats had no chance,” remembered Joel Heitkamp. “I spoke to a number of his employees about whether or not he was progressive, or just another conservative. And they said, ‘No, he talks to us, we have meetings.’ One of the reasons I was in a room with him is that he was known to be pro-choice. If you talk to the people that were in his life before all of this, you’re going find that he was very much pro-choice.”

Burgum’s cash allowed him to run as an outsider and drown the airwaves with ads. He shrugged off a third-place finish at the state Republican convention — correctly diagnosing that party apparatchiks were out of step with actual voters — and the fact he trailed longtime Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem by 40 points. He put 15,000 miles on a campaign car and won in a landslide.

That was eight years ago. Now, Heitkamp spends much of his radio show skewering Burgum over his flip-flops. He trotted down to his studio to find a soundbite for me of Burgum saying two years ago that he would never be Trump’s running mate.

“He just flipped with the winds to what you need to say to be a Republican today,” said Heitkamp with a toothy grin. “It just showed that I don’t have as much wisdom as I think I have.”

A few days later, I met with state Rep. Boschee at the Blarney Stone in downtown Fargo. For the first 20 minutes, Boschee rhapsodized about Burgum’s bipartisanship. Despite the Democrats’ small numbers in Bismarck, Burgum included them in all policy discussions. “It wasn’t fake,” said Boschee. “He wanted to know what we thought. He was great on social issues.”

It was in early 2023 when Boschee heard that Burgum was considering running for president. Not long after, Burgum signed a near-total ban on abortion with the only exception being in the first six weeks if rape and incest could be proven. (Abortion had been legal up to 22 weeks before the new law.) Heitkamp said he asked Burgum about why he signed the bill, and Burgum answered that the bill was going to become law regardless. That’s true, but it’s also true the law would have gone into effect without Burgum’s signature and an accompanying statement that the law “reaffirms North Dakota as a pro-life state.”

Burgum also rolled back earlier support for transgender kids being allowed to participate in high school sports. The political calculus was clear to Boschee: Burgum was doing what he needed to do to make himself palatable to a national Republican electorate.

“It’s a small town,” said Boschee about Fargo. “I’m going to run into him at some point, at a restaurant or grocery store. And I’ll say something, that this is not OK.”

Boschee paused for a moment and then smiled.

“Well, he’s not back here very much. Maybe I won’t run into him.”

‘He doesn’t have a lot of time to waste’

I t was Beau Bateman who connected me with the Hansons. We met for the first time on a rainy day in Fargo that had allowed Bateman to slip away from his Grand Forks farm duties for a few hours. Bateman has a heartland sincerity that explained why Burgum chose Bateman to introduce him at his presidential kick-off last June. He talked warmly and honestly about his friend but noticeably tensed up when I asked if he could explain the Doug-Donald alliance. He paused for a long moment and told me that Burgum has always been a solver of problems.

“Doug loves to fix things,” said Bateman. “So, if you’re the mechanic and you’re smart, you’re going to ask, ‘How can I get my hands on the machine because I can make this better. What’s my path?’”

Left unsaid was that Trump was the path. Bateman and Burgum have kids approximately the same age, and the farmer remembers them both telling their children to make good choices. Burgum then added a note: “Make good choices, but go fast.” Burgum is now 67. “Doug wants to get things done and knows he doesn’t have a lot of time to waste,” said Bateman. “He’s lost people.” (Burgum’s older brother died in 2010 at 58.)

Bateman stopped and picked me up in Dickinson, and we rode out to the Hanson ranch. Along I-94, we started seeing signs for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Bateman told me Burgum had always had a kinship to Teddy. “The Badlands healed Teddy, and I got to believe they reached Doug the same way.”

In a way, everything you need to know about Burgum as a political animal can be explained in some way by his affinity for Roosevelt. It has brought out the best and worst in him. The day after my ranch visit, I made my way to Medora where the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is under construction and due to open on July 4, 2026. I got a tour from Robbie Lauf, the library’s director of programming and partnerships. Lauf, like Burgum, graduated from North Dakota State University and toiled at McKinsey. He also happened to be Burgum’s first campaign hire.

After Burgum’s inauguration, Lauf was named one of the governor’s policy advisers. At the time, there was a plan for a $15 million project to accentuate an existing Teddy Roosevelt collection at nearby Dickinson State. But some North Dakotans had the idea of a grander TR project to be built in the Medora hills with their majestic views of the Badlands. Lauf remembers his first approach to the governor about the more ambitious proposal.

“So, I have this presentation of why the $15-million Dickinson project should be a $50-million project in Medora,” recalled Lauf. “But then he quietly looks at me, says, ‘I think you’re wrong. It’s a $500-million project that should be enduring.’”

All Burgum had to do was pass legislation approving the plan and raise $400 million from both public and private sources. How he did it and how he reacted to those who opposed him gives a window into a political style that suggest a Burgum-Trump ticket might not be as ridiculous a mismatch as it sounds. It turns out Burgum has a taste for Trumpesque revenge.

‘I thought it was cowardice’

O n an overcast day, I found North Dakota state Sen. Jeff Magrum as he was looking for a lost calf. He had been taking care of her ailing momma, but by the time he got her to safety, the calf had wandered off. “I’ll find her after we talk,” Magrum said with a pull on his cap.

Emmons County, where Magrum’s ranch is located, has a population of just over 3,000, and the nearest commercial concern is a gas station 10 miles away. It seemed an odd place to talk vice presidential politics, but Magrum represents one of the few failures in Burgum’s political life.

When Burgum first ran for governor in 2016, he happily campaigned with Magrum at a nearby diner. “It was the first year Trump ran, and Doug was running as an outsider,” recalled Magrum. “He talked to everyone. He was really great.”

Things changed — at least for Magrum — after Burgum was elected. Magrum first earned Burgum’s ire for releasing the names of candidates being considered for various state boards. Magrum, then a state representative, thought it was necessary transparency while Burgum fumed it would cause problems for potential nominees who had not even been formally offered positions. Meanwhile, Magrum was irritating Burgum with his opposition to the Roosevelt project.

“My constituents felt that if Teddy Roosevelt was such an important president, then why didn’t New York, where he comes from and where there’s a lot more people, build a library for him?” said Magrum with a gruff laugh. “And it’s in the middle of nowhere and freezing half the year.”

Burgum called him the night before the vote to appropriate money for the project and tried to twist his arm. Magrum didn’t budge. According to Magrum, Burgum vowed: “Fine, you’re not going to be invited when we invite Trump out here to do the ribbon cutting.”

“That’s a complete fabrication,” said Rob Lockwood, a spokesperson for Burgum.

Magrum said he was OK with that. It wasn’t as if Burgum needed his vote — it passed the House easily 76-16. But the governor didn’t forget. In 2020, a Burgum-funded PAC (headed by Lauf) spent $1 million trying to unseat Magrum and other Burgum opponents.

“He was trying to force me out,” Magrum said, “but I didn’t get out.”

Magrum spread on his dining room table a half-dozen mailers sent to voters denouncing Magrum for his vote against Burgum’s budget, implying that he was undermining police and schools. “I had people telling me they were up to 17 mailings in a single day,” said Magrum.

But then a funny thing happened. Burgum did not come to Magrum’s district to personally campaign for his anointed candidates. “I thought it was cowardice,” said Magrum. “If you’re going to do all this, put your reputation on the line and go door to door.”

At this point, it should be said that Magrum is on the extreme end of the conservative scale. While North Dakota Republicans hold a supermajority of state Legislature seats, they have split into two camps, one mainstream and the other known as the Bastiat Caucus, named somewhat improbably after the 19 ^th -century radical French economist.

Magrum is a proud Bastiat, and the Bastiats hate everything. (They also control the Republican party apparatus, which is why Burgum is a mere alternate delegate to the GOP convention in Milwaukee.) Magrum and his allies opposed Burgum’s push for a mandatory seat belt law, which seems like a good idea in a state where everyone — me included — drives 90 mph on the way to meet someone for lunch 120 miles away.

“We all know that seat belts are good, but for the government to get in everybody’s vehicle, that’s a slippery slope,” Magrum said. “Next thing, they’re sitting there in your house and telling you that you’re not eating right.”

Still, even Burgum’s biggest allies in North Dakota winced at the optics of a gazillionaire dropping planeloads of money on the Jeff Magrums of the state.

Nor was it particularly effective. Magrum won reelection by 251 votes. The governor tried again in 2022 to finish off Magrum. Instead, Magrum won election to the state Senate by over 10 points; Burgum’s attacks made Magrum a folk hero in his petite corner of North Dakota.

“He literally turned my enemies back into friends, including some of my family,” said Magrum.

On my way out, I asked Magrum whether he was in favor of Burgum joining the Trump ticket. By now, Magrum was feeling his oats, and he said no way. This is particularly relevant since Magrum is one of North Dakota’s three presidential electors.

“I’ve got people contacting me all the time saying, ‘Can you get a message to Trump? Burgum is not one of us.’”

I asked what he meant.

“He’s a globalist,” said Magrum. “You’ve seen all the photos of him with Bill Gates, right?” He then whispered even though we were alone in his house. “The biggest concern is that they take Trump out and Burgum becomes president,” he said. “And he ushers us right into the new world order.”

Magrum’s not very original charge was met with vigorous pushback.

“Governor Burgum and North Dakota have advanced the America First Agenda, especially in the economic, national security, and energy arenas,” said Lockwood.

‘We thank you, Harold’

B urgum ran for governor in 2016 on what you could call a good government platform. He spoke about bringing a job creator to the governor’s office. He decried the old-boy network that ran things in Bismarck. On occasion, he railed against corporate influence in the state’s oil industry. Burgum accused Wayne Stenehjem, his opponent in the GOP primary, of a conflict of interest for taking tens of thousands of dollars from energy companies and their executives, citing the governor’s seat on the North Dakota Industrial Commission, the regulatory board for the energy industry. “If you’re a member of the NDIC, and you’re asking for someone’s support, and you regulate that industry and they know you’re going to continue to regulate them, think about the power dynamic,” said Burgum.

Once he was in office, Burgum’s understanding of that power dynamic evolved.

North Dakota has a reputation as a bottom-lister in the union, the only state whose population dropped between 1930 and 2000). Oil and gas changed that. The development of fracking techniques — injecting pressurized liquid deep into the earth to crack open rock formations — led to exponential growth (in revenue and people) in millions of acres of previously inaccessible shale formations in western North Dakota. One of the fracking pioneers has been Harold Hamm, an Oklahoma oil man. This blurb from Hamm’s 2023 book, Game Changer , notes his importance to North Dakota:

“With ingenuity, determination, and pure grit, Harold Hamm’s risk-taking and entrepreneurship transformed America’s energy landscape and made possible U.S. energy security and independence…”

Those are the words of NDIC board member Gov. Doug Burgum.

Asked about this, Burgum spokesman Lockwood answered, “Gov. Burgum has largely self-funded his campaigns.”

At Burgum’s 2023 State of the State address, Hamm sat in the gallery as Burgum heaped praise on the head of Continental Resources, an Oklahoma energy company whose profits have made Hamm one of the richest men in the world, with an estimated net worth near $20 billion. “Harold and Continental helped lead the horizontal drilling revolution that began over 25 years ago — a game-changer that unlocked our vast state and tribal shale oil reserves and changed the course of our entire economy,” said Burgum. “We thank you, Harold, your family and your entire Continental team!”

Burgum wasn’t done. Later in the speech, he returned to his pet legislative project: the Roosevelt library. Hamm, it turns out, was a big part of that, too. “It is fitting that with deepest gratitude, that here today in these chambers, where the TR Library endowment was brought to life, we make the first public announcement that Harold Hamm has completed a gift of $50 million to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation.”

Hamm had reason to thank Burgum as well. As governor, Burgum passed legislation that reduced the state oil revenue tax from 11.5 percent to 10 percent.

“We understood that the big players — Continental, ExxonMobil, Marathon — they’re kind of like state governments, they have budgets, and they have a decision to make about where they allocate drilling dollars,” recalled David Hogue, the state senate president. “So we thought that it would be good policy to actually lower our tax. Governor Burgum was supportive of that and pushing against all the new federal regulations.”

2023 proved to be a pivotal year in their alliance. Not only did Burgum accept Hamm’s $50 million donation to the library, Hamm’s Continental Resources donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting Burgum’s presidential run. Their connections don’t end there. Burgum has been pushing for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, while he simultaneously pushed the Trump talking point that more drilling and energy production is needed in North Dakota and the rest of the United States. The seemingly opposite policy goals reminded some of Burgum’s original hedged position on abortion. Burgum solved his energy policy contradiction by promoting a 2,000-mile pipeline system that would transport carbon dioxide from North Dakota and four other states to north central North Dakota where it would be buried thousands of feet underground.

“We can reach carbon neutrality in the state of North Dakota by 2030 without a single mandate, without any additional regulation,” said Burgum. “We can get there just through the innovation and the different geology that we have.”

In 2022, Hamm announced that Continental Resources was investing $250 million in Burgum’s pipeline dream. You may know where this is going: Hamm was the same man talking up Burgum’s energy acumen to Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

‘OK, I’m a little worried’

I saw Burgum exactly one time during my 12 days in North Dakota. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Almost nobody in North Dakota saw Burgum in May. ( The Fargo Forum reported Burgum was out of state for 19 days that month. Actually, it was probably 20 since they missed a trip to speak with the Vermont Republican party faithful.)

Burgum spoke on Memorial Day, the 27th, at a veterans’ cemetery near Bismarck. He looked comfortable in a way he had not two days earlier in North Carolina and he spoke with emotion about sacrifice and gratitude. Afterward, he stuck around and posed for pictures with anyone who wanted one and shook every hand. It was an event celebrating sailors and soldiers who gave their lives, and I figured it would be tacky to interrupt, so I planned to buttonhole him at a land board meeting a few days later in Bismarck where Burgum deals with oil revenue collection and how to disburse said funds to North Dakota’s schools.

Things changed. On May 31, the Trump jury in New York was heading into a second day of deliberation, and Burgum, who had raced back to New York shortly after the Memorial Day event, was spotted accompanying Trump into the courthouse that morning. I asked Joel Heitkamp whether he thought Burgum would come back to North Dakota for his June 1 schedule of events or stay by Trump’s side.

“The Land Board is all about oil and could have something to do with Continental and Harold Hamm,” said Heitkamp. “He won’t miss that.”

So I left Fargo to make the three-hour drive to Bismarck. It had already been a busy day for Burgum. That morning, Trump came out for North Dakota Rep. Kelly Armstrong to replace Burgum as a governor. This was a bit awkward since Burgum was supporting Tammy Miller, his lieutenant governor. (Burgum never actually campaigned for Miller, and Armstrong won the primary in a landslide.)

This made me ask a close Burgum friend whether he was worried Trump would eventually turn on Burgum like he did on former Vice President Mike Pence. “I’m not worried at all,” said the friend. “Doug can handle him.” He paused for a moment. “OK, I’m a little worried.”

I got on the road around 4 p.m. with news that the Trump jury was being sent home for the day. By the time I hit Valley City, AM radio was interrupting corn futures reports to announce the jury had not gone home but had reached a verdict. An hour later, it was announced that Trump was guilty on all counts. I pulled into Bismarck around 6:30 p.m. and had an idea: I’d stake out the private aviation terminal at the Bismarck Airport and catch Burgum flying in all bleary-eyed and maybe up for a quick chat. The summer sky was settling into a sunset glow when I got an email from a North Dakota reporter friend: The Land Board meeting had just been postponed from Friday to Monday. There was another message a few minutes later. The Monday meeting would be a video conference so Burgum could dial in from wherever he was in Trump’s world.

But I did see Burgum the next morning. He was on my hotel television. Burgum was still in Manhattan and called the Trump proceedings a “sham trial” and denounced the jury. “If those 12 voted for president today, it would be 12 for Biden and zero for President Trump,” said Burgum, without any attempt at supporting evidence. Burgum’s brand once represented intelligence and creativity but now seemed indistinguishable from Ramaswamy or the others defending Trump on cable news.

Burgum was now so far from the Logging Camp Ranch that I wondered whether he would ever find his way back home.