By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos
Daily Kos Staff
Kristi Noem has done plenty of terrible things as governor of South Dakota. That includes disregarding COVID-19 safety rules and being among the first to treat the whole pandemic as a political opportunity. No pencil-pushing scientist was going to tell her what to do, even if that meant citizens in South Dakota had to be airlifted out of state for treatment due to overcrowding.
She’s banned from visiting 10% of the land in her own state because of her continuous disrespect for Native Americans. She insists on staging fireworks displays in the middle of a drought. And she’s currently being sued after doing a commercial for a cosmetic dentist in Texas to pay for her new set of teeth.
With all that, Noem had still barely made a dent in the national news until she told a grisly story of how she shot a family dog and tossed its body in a gravel pit when it failed to perform to her satisfaction. But just because she’s been revealed as an empathy-deprived monster, don’t assume that she’s not at the top of Donald Trump’s shortlist for vice president.
In 2008, I bundled our 17-year-old golden retriever named Tigger into my arms and took her to the vet. Tigger’s parents had been national champions with more initials after their names than a Harvard professor, but she had been born deaf, making her poorly suited for the whistles and voice commands of retriever trials and agility training. Instead, she came home with us, a tiny yellow fuzzball, to be my son’s dog through every level of school, steal slices of pizza from the table, and shed small mountains of yellow fur.
At 17, she was a two-time cancer survivor, missing her tail and with long surgical scars. Now the cancer was back again. For once, she didn’t even want a potato chip. She had been in pain for weeks, trembling, incontinent, and losing weight. But once we were in the room at the vet, she seemed to understand what was going on. She stood up straight, wagged her little nub of a tail, and gave me a look that said, “I’m fine. Let’s go home.”
That was, without a doubt, one of the hardest days of my life. I can’t think of it without worrying that I did something unforgivably wrong.
A lot of people have stories like mine, which can make Noem’s casual admission about shooting her dog Cricket because it failed to meet her performance standards nothing short of horrifying. Truthfully, it sounds like Cricket was a hoot, and the fact that Noem’s child asked about Cricket the moment she stepped off the school bus certainly suggests that this was more than just one of a pack of hunting dogs that hung around the Noem farm.
Following Rolling Stone’s story about Noem’s book, there have been reactions, and reactions to those reactions. That includes Noem defending herself by pointing out that she didn’t just shoot a dog and a goat, she also put down three horses. On Sunday, Noem issued a statement saying that “South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down.” What she means by this is that Noem was silly enough to load an untrained dog into a truck and take it straight into the middle of a bunch of chickens. However, the operative word of that South Dakota law is “can.” Noem didn’t have to shoot the dog, she decided to shoot the dog. Because giving it proper training and attention was too much bother.
What Noem did to Cricket is reminiscent of what Trump did to the Grand Ole Party.
That wasn’t her only incomprehensible decision. It’s bad enough that Noem took this action in making her life simpler by murdering an animal that depended on her. But what may be of equal importance is that Noem chose to tell this story. She may now be complaining that “some people are upset about a 20 year old story,” but she’s the one who decided to lift this incident out of her life and plop it on a page.
Did she think that people would not be upset? Did she think this would be seen as an example of her South Dakota toughness? The simple decision to tell this story, along with the way she told it, shows that her perceptions are badly skewed.
At Semafor, one Republican brushes Noem off as a lightweight and says they don’t want a “Kamala problem” (they wish), but anyone who thinks this incident is going to knock Noem from the list of Trump’s VP potentials should think again.
Noem may open her tale of pet murder by saying “I hated that dog”—which more than a little undercuts her excuses—but she’s not alone in that feeling. As GQ noted back in 2020, Trump also hates all dogs. When Trump wants to insult someone, he compares them to a dog. When he wants to demean someone’s death, he says they died like a dog. “In Trump’s tiny mind,” writes GQ, “dogs are venal, treacherous creatures.”
Trump isn’t going to throw Noem away over a dog. He may even give her a gold star. Because what Noem has generated is a lot of discussion and a metric shit-ton of disgust. She’s identified one of those things that would seem to be beyond the boundary of acceptable behavior.
You know, like insulting prisoners of war. Or demeaning Gold Star families. Or attacking the children of a judge.
Trump loves to find those boundaries and rip them apart. He revels in his ability to convince his followers to join in the destruction. It’s not hard to see Trump loving Noem’s story of dog murder.
It may even make him a little jealous.
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