If you’re a vice presidential hopeful trying to catch Donald Trump’s eye, there are worse ways to do it than bragging about killing your dog for doing ordinary dog things.
Kristi Noem, who’s best known as the COVID-loving governor of one of America’s top rectangular states, has added capricious dog killer to her résumé. And while in another place, time, or universe it might have seemed outlandish to suggest she’s mentioning her dog-murdering bona fides in order to woo notorious dog-hater Trump, in this political climate, that theory seriously has to be considered.
In a new book to be released next month and shared with The Guardian, Noem says she killed her “untrainable” 14-month-old hunting dog Cricket after it ate a local family’s chickens. Yes, she wrote this down—and actually tried to use it as an example of her surpassing grit, determination, and wisdom.
According to Noem, Cricket was an incorrigible dog. So incorrigible that at one point, Noem used an electronic collar (bzzzt, strike one) to force the dog to behave. That didn’t work, and one day on the way home from a pheasant hunt—which Cricket ruined by going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life” (i.e., acting like a dog)—Cricket attacked a local family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
Noem, who had just gotten back from shooting at wild birds, decided Cricket, who’d killed some far-worthier domesticated birds, had behaved like “a trained assassin,” and she knew she had to get rid of her.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, claiming she was “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
It was then that Noem realized she “had to put her down.”
Oh, but she wasn’t done. As it happens, her dog murder touched off a mini-killing spree. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
And that’s when she iced the goat.
Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.
Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
Of course, Republicans as a rule have a long and sordid history with dogs.
There was Richard Nixon and his horribly insincere and mawkish Checkers speech. There was Mitt Romney—one of the “good” Republicans—strapping his dog Seamus to the roof of his car for a jaunty 12-hour road trip. And there’s Florida senator-cum-Medicare fraudster Rick Scott, who adopted a dog in 2012 when he ran for governor, named him Reagan, and then abandoned him for doing dog things. (Unfortunately, when the real Reagan did disgusting Reagan things far worse than eating poop or humping Ed Meese’s leg, Republicans just clung to him harder.)
But as they say, the cruelty is the point. In fact, Republicans—particularly in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—have lately been wearing their insensate evil as a badge of honor.
As Julie Alderman Boudrea of the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge noted on Twitter of Noem’s dog-killing confession, “This is absolutely part of the audition” to be Trump’s VP because he hates dogs and, “This is what Trump wants in a VP; someone who will literally murder a puppy if it gets in her way.”
Note Noem’s callous response when she was recently asked about South Dakota’s near-absolute abortion ban.
“We rely on South Dakota, on the fact that I’m pro-life and we have a law that says that there is an exception for the life of the mother, and I just don’t believe a tragedy should perpetuate another tragedy,” said Noem in response to a question from CNN’s Dana Bash.
In other words, a 12-year-old girl being brutally raped is a tragedy, but allowing her to choose whether to take her rapist’s baby to term is an equal, if not greater, tragedy.
The question is, if these kinds of outrages aren’t dealbreakers for Republican voters, what would or could be? Maybe nothing. After all, Trump bragged—in a fucking book—about pursuing married women, and the GOP just loved him more.
The only conclusion? This is exactly the kind of cruelty GOP voters want. And they’re increasingly bad at hiding it.
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