All dogs go to heaven, but South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s puppy-executing ways may have just cost her a chance at entering the promised land of the White House as Donald Trump’s running mate.
Several Republicans close to Trump — who, admittedly, are aligned with others vying for the Trump VP slot, or who simply don’t like Noem — are using the MAGA governor’s story of shooting and killing an unruly puppy to try to help nuke the former president’s opinion of her. In the days since the story from Noem’s memoir went viral, multiple Trump allies and confidants flagged the dog-killing and press coverage of it directly to Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter and another source briefed on it, hoping it would cause him to view her as an out-of-touch buffoon.
Trump has been the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee for nearly two months now, which means the intra-party jockeying between the rival camps pushing different GOP veep picks has had plenty of time to get ugly. It wasn’t surprising that elite conservatives who are boosting non-Noem contenders could barely conceal their glee over the weekend, ecstatic that the governor essentially did their work for them and delivered such a uniquely awful self-inflicted wound. “She did oppo against herself,” one Trump adviser says, mockingly.
Another individual close to the Trump campaign told Semafor that Noem “just keeps proving over and over that she’s a lightweight.”
Last week, The Guardian obtained an advanced copy of Noem’s upcoming book, No Going Back. In the political memoir, the governor details the story of Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer puppy she intended to use as a pheasant-hunting dog. After an ill-fated hunt during which Cricket spent more time “out of her mind with excitement” chasing birds than following her owner’s commands — and then proceeded to take out her instincts on some unfortunate local chickens — Noem took Cricket to a gravel pit and executed what she called a “worthless” dog she “hated.”
The story drew immediate backlash from those understandably disturbed at the notion of someone bragging about killing a perfectly healthy animal over instinctual behavior.
Dan Lussen, a professional hunting-dog trainer, told Rolling Stone that a 14-month-old dog is a “baby that doesn’t know any better.”
“Why would you put a dog down with these instincts? It’s a hunting dog, and you got chickens — he doesn’t know the difference,” Lussen added.
Zak George, a professional dog trainer, told CNN over the weekend that the behavior exhibited by Cricket was “very typical adolescent behavior out of a dog that’s been bred to have endless stamina and endurance.”
On Sunday, Noem doubled down on her decision to put down Cricket, as well as an aging goat on her farm, writing in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that “South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down.”
“Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did,” she added. The governor’s claim that Cricket had bitten multiple individuals was not recounted in The Guardian’s original retelling of the anecdote.
“Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor,” Noem added.
While Trump’s allies may be trying to use the story to bury Noem’s VP chances, Trump’s past comments indicate he doesn’t exactly have a soft spot for dogs.
The former president often uses canine descriptors as insults toward his enemies and political opponents. He famously said that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died “like a dog,” remarked that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was “sweating like a dog” during a 2016 debate, and said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) “choked like a dog” during his ill-fated 2012 run for the presidency.
Trump has yet to comment publicly on Noem killing her dog.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”