President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he plans to select North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as his nominee for Secretary of the Interior.
“We have a big announcement, and I won’t tell you, it’s — I won’t tell you the name of him, the exact name,” Trump teased in his remarks at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, for an America First Policy Institute event. “I think he’s an incredible person, he has an incredibly wonderful wife named Kathryn. So I won’t tell you — his name could be something like ‘Burgum.’ Burgum.
“He’s from North Dakota. He will be announced tomorrow for a very big position,” Trump added before pointing and waving at Burgum.
Moments later, he announced that Burgum “will lead the Ministry of the Interior, and he will be fantastic.”
Asked for comment, Burgum spokesman Rob Lockwood said Burgum’s team will wait to comment until Friday, when Trump said he will make the formal announcement.
Shortly before Trump’s comments, NBC News asked Burgum whether there had been any discussions about his nomination as Secretary of the Interior.
“There have been a lot of discussions about a lot of different things,” he told reporters.
“Nothing is true until you read it on Truth Social,” he added.
Burgum was a familiar presence on the campaign trail for Trump, who had considered selecting him as his running mate before settling on J.D. Vance.
Burgum, who has a business background, sold a software company to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion in stock. He then worked at Microsoft as a senior vice president until 2007 and moved on to other business ventures in real estate and venture capital.
He was first elected governor in 2016 and was re-elected in 2020. North Dakota introduced term limits for governors in 2022 that would prevent any governor from running for a third term, but that measure did not retroactively apply to Burgum, who was already in office. .
Burgum has opted not to seek a third term in 2024, and his second term will expire when his successor, Rep. Kelly Armstrong, takes office in December.
He ran a lengthy presidential campaign and dropped out of the race in December 2023 after failing to qualify for the November 2023 primary debate.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
