After taking his software company public in 1997, Doug Burgum gathered a few colleagues in his office and swore them to secrecy.
He wanted to maintain the modesty and decency central to his North Dakota birthright and his past as a chimney sweep, but he was eager to show off with a flashy new purchase. While others splurged on cars or boats, Mr. Burgum’s big reveal was a Bobcat front-end loader – an earth-moving machine for his ranch near Fargo.
“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, Doug, you’re not exaggerating anyone,'” recalls Jeff Young, the software company’s former operations manager, with a laugh.
As governor of North Dakota, Burgum’s long-standing concerns about being seen as an attention-grabber have catapulted the longtime Republican from political obscurity into the spotlight, making him one of the few front-runners in Donald J. Trump’s search for a running mate.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has requested personal information and other documents from a wide range of potential vice presidential candidates, including Mr. Burgum, both as part of his vetting process and as a media strategy to create excitement ahead of a formal announcement scheduled for next month Republican National Convention, according to three people briefed on the process who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
But Mr. Trump appears to have narrowed his focus to candidates with the ability to run a disciplined campaign, the people said. For a presidential candidate who was convicted of 34 felonies last month and still faces numerous other legal problems, reducing the potential for unwanted distractions is becoming increasingly important.
Mr. Burgum has clearly positioned himself as the primary candidate and has spent months supporting Mr. Trump on the campaign trail and in court while risking his own political capital back home for a former president who values loyalty, demands fealty and rejects any attempt to interfere in Considered a betrayal of both in his spotlight.
Mr Burgum has become perhaps the safest option on Mr Trump’s list – and the biggest wild card.
He is largely untested on a national stage and is not known for rousing applause lines on the stump. Mr. Burgum has little public profile even among Mr. Trump’s attentive political base and is not an ideological warrior like others being considered.
And yet his ambition in business and politics in North Dakota sets him apart. He has spent millions of his own dollars on political causes, including his underdog run for governor in 2016 and his support of an aggressive parade of Republican primary challengers against state lawmakers in 2018. His short-lived but long-term bid for the White House last year cost him $14 million.
A spokesman for Mr. Burgum declined to comment. A Trump campaign spokesman said only the former president knew who he would choose as vice president.
At age 67, Mr. Burgum is closer to a generational comrade of the 77-year-old former president than most other Republicans under serious consideration. He supported Mr. Trump in 2016 but won both races for governor without relying on the former president’s help. His independence, both electorally and financially, has helped ease the burden on Mr. Trump, who keeps a close eye on the political debt he owes, say two people familiar with the former president’s thinking.
Mr. Burgum has a Stanford degree, speaks easily about sports and has a thick head of hair that he wore in a ponytail as a younger man and that is now the object of Mr. Trump’s admiration. The former president has privately told people that Mr. Burgum has the “central casting” look he prefers in public figures.
In some ways, he could easily be described as a mild-mannered Midwesterner. In college, he worked as a chimney sweep and wore a black top hat and tails to resemble Dick Van Dyke’s character in “Mary Poppins.” When he oversaw the construction of a new hotel in downtown Fargo, he made sure it would be shorter than North Dakota’s tallest building – the state capital in Bismarck – so as not to cause a fuss.
Mr. Trump has been discussing Mr. Burgum for a possible Cabinet post, speculation is that allies of other vice presidential candidates have been eager to discount him as a possible candidate for the candidacy. The result was a flurry of rumors linking Mr. Burgum to multiple agencies, which his allies privately referred to as “Cabinet Bingo.”
“Opportunist isn’t exactly the right word,” said Ed Schafer, a former Republican governor of North Dakota. “But Doug Burgum is very good at spotting opportunities.”
Notoriety in North Dakota
Douglas James Burgum grew up in a tiny town in North Dakota, but was born into a huge piece of the state’s history.
His great-grandmother, Linda Slaughter, was one of the first settlers in the Dakota Territory. She opened the city’s first school, was a close friend of Susan B. Anthony and, at the 1892 Populist Party convention in Omaha, was the first American woman to vote for a presidential candidate at a national convention.
Ms. Slaughter’s daughter Jessamine was the first woman admitted to North Dakota State University, where a residence hall was named after her in 1962.
Jessamine Slaughter – Mr. Burgum’s grandmother – eventually moved to Arthur, North Dakota, a small town where her father-in-law had helped settle. Her husband, Joseph A. Burgum, managed the local granary, which the family founded in 1906. The family still runs the business, which remains central to the local economy.
Mrs. Slaughter’s youngest son, Joseph B. Burgum, married Katherine Kilbourne, a college dean. The youngest of their three children, Douglas, was sworn in as the 33rd Governor of North Dakota in December 2016.
As a student at North Dakota State, Mr. Burgum avoided declaring a major and instead asked friends about their most passionate teachers and enrolled in those courses. When a guidance counselor told him he had enough credits to graduate, the school awarded him a degree in “university studies.”
At Stanford Graduate School of Business, he played soccer and basketball and became friends with Steve Ballmer, the future Microsoft billionaire. Mr. Burgum earned his MBA and left California to work in Chicago at McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm.
When a colleague demonstrated a new Apple II computer that, in minutes, calculated the numbers Mr. Burgum had spent hours calculating by hand, he decided to change careers and become a technology entrepreneur.
Somewhat unlikely that he moved back to Fargo to do this.
Beau Bateman, a farmer in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, tied and branded cattle with Mr. Burgum when they worked on the ranch in college. He was not surprised that Mr. Burgum returned home.
“He’s just a patriot for us,” Mr. Bateman said as he sat on the back door of his Ford F-150, stomping along the gravel road in his cowboy boots.
Billion dollar companies
Mr. Burgum was 26 when he literally bet the family farm.
He mortgaged 160 acres of farmland he inherited from his father to finance a $250,000 stake in Great Plains Software, a small start-up based in Fargo. With the help of additional family investment, he soon took control of the company and assumed the position of managing director.
To attract talent, he pulled lists of graduates from North Dakota schools and launched his first direct mail campaign, recruiting engineers to return home and work at a company where he promoted a family-friendly culture. He insisted on a front door for the new office building that would never be locked and instead opened into a vestibule so that those who had forgotten their keys could go in and wait to be let in, protected from the bitter winter winds.
In 1997, the company became the first technology company in North Dakota to go public.
Four years later, his old college friend, Mr. Ballmer, called.
Mr. Burgum sold the company to Microsoft in 2001 for a $1.1 billion stock deal and stepped in as a top executive. After six years, he left the company and invested in SuccessFactors, a human relations software company, where he was chairman of the board. German software giant SAP bought the company in 2010 for around $3.4 billion.
In 2012, Mr. Burgum invested in Atlassian, an Australia-based cloud software company that went public in 2015 and is now valued at more than $40 billion. He served as the company’s chief executive officer until 2016, when he resigned before being sworn in as governor.
Mr. Burgum’s previous career as an entrepreneur could help address the concerns of pro-business voters torn between Mr. Trump’s perceived trade policies and President Biden’s loyalty to unions. But it is doubtful whether many people even know him.
When asked last summer during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he would ever do business with Mr. Trump, Mr. Burgum replied: “I don’t think so.”
“I just think it’s important,” Mr. Burgum said, “that you be judged by the company you keep.”
Mr. Burgum has since reversed that position, telling Fox News last week that he now understands Mr. Trump better after having “the opportunity to travel with him – the opportunity to see him, to meet the real person.”
This kind of political expediency is something of an art form in Arthur, North Dakota
Shirley Nedrebo, 88, who lived across the street from Mr. Burgum as a boy and still does, has a Trump campaign hat, a souvenir from a 2018 rally in Fargo. One side of the red cap is fastened with a Burgum campaign pin. The other has a pin for Ben Carson, a former Cabinet secretary who is also being considered as a candidate.
She praised Mr. Burgum and his family but held back when asked who Mr. Trump should vote for.
“Trump,” she added, “will pick the right person.”
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2024-06-09 09:02:40
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