• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, April 29, 2024

Trump voters value toughness, and generally think the libs are weak and gutless. They don’t mind voting for someone under indictment, which perhaps even bestows MAGA credibility.

And when it comes to dogs, former President Donald Trump likes to insult humans by saying someone “choked like a dog.” 

Or was “fired like a dog.”

Still, apparently, the one thing citizens of both parties agree on is that executing a puppy in cold blood and then bragging about it is horrific and unacceptable.

This is progress!

I refer, of course, to the Kristi Noem brouhaha. Now lame duck governor of South Dakota, Noem is vying to be DJT’s vice president, and has the hair extensions and lip injections to prove it.

Last week, U.K.’s The Guardian got an advance copy of her forthcoming autobiography “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.”

The Guardian broke that part of the book that recalled an incident from 20 years ago, when Noem shot a dog and a goat who lived on her family farm -- one after the other -- and proudly recounted the tale.

Incredibly, as she explains it in the memoir (her second), Noem brought Cricket, a female wirehaired pointer around 14 months old, to hunt pheasants. When Noem brought her to a hunt, Cricket went "out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds.”  Her electronic collar failed to stop her, and according to Noem, she “ruined the hunt.”  Afterward, Cricket escaped Noem's truck and killed several of another family's chickens in "pure joy.” Then she "whipped around to bite" Noem -- but did not bite her.

So Noem concluded that she "hated that dog," that Cricket was "less than worthless" for "a hunting dog," and needed to be shot. She dragged her to a “gravel pit” and did so. And then with the blood lust rising in her veins, she went after a male goat that was "disgusting, musky, rancid,” and "nasty and mean." She brought the goat to the same pit, but he deflected the first bullet. So she went to her truck, got another shell, and killed him on the second shot.

She even added that when her daughter got off the school bus, she asked, “Where’s Cricket?” 

Obviously, we live in a dog-loving culture. Mitt Romney will never live down putting his dog Seamus in a crate on the roof of his car when the dog had diarrhea and the family was on vacation. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins repeated the story for years every time she mentioned Romney.

And certainly, there’s a whole population of chicken-less people who’d adopt a cool-looking, rambunctious puppy and happily train her.

If nothing else, there have been a number of dark cultural jokes along the way suggesting that killing a puppy is verboten, and that the person who would do so is sociopath-ish.

I speak of the National Lampoon’s famous cover, showing a pistol pointing at a dog’s face, with the headline, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog,” and the movie character Cruella de Vil, the ultimate fashion victim, who kidnapped and killed Dalmatian puppies for their fur. (Is that more or less gruesome than filling one with buckshot because he became annoying?) Kids would crumble with her every villainous appearance on screen.

So you’d think that Noem might have a hunch that dredging up a gratuitous dog-execution story from two decades ago might be unnecessary for her book, which will be given away at an upcoming RNC fundraiser.

She says the story is a way of showing she can make the tough decisions and implement them in a heartbeat. Part of that is representing herself as someone who can punch at the media and pop culture.

But what she did is so off-putting I must wonder whether the people who worked with her on the book, or her publicist, hate her, and knew what would happen.

The story was immediately met with outrage. But Noem only doubled down in responding to The Guardian's piece by saying that “tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years."

But her notes of triumphalism make her seem clueless. So does that disingenuous, “If I were a better politician, I wouldn’t say this” line that she used to introduce the story.

Because this is all about politics and marketing.

Noem used the incidents as part of the pitch for her memoir on X: “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back.’”

What she didn’t figure on is that she’s also leaving her voters angry and gasping.

Sure, Noem's name recognition has shot through the roof in the last week. But what she’s discovered is that dogs are uniters. We’re now raising our fists to the sky, wishing she’d stick to her previously embarrassing behavior like doing de facto ads for a dentist in Texas who gave her a new “fabulous smile.” Or talking proudly about giving her two-year-old granddaughter a rifle. Or saying that making exceptions for abortions due to incest or rape are “a disaster.”

Now the question is: Does this doggie-murder incident make her toxic as a running mate to Trump, or more attractive?

Impossible to say. But perhaps she’ll be fired like a dog.