Kristi Noem is on quite a roll lately. The South Dakota governor—a once-rising GOP star—is irked that people are calling her unpublishable names simply because she murdered her dog for being a skosh too dog-like. And now she has further ‘splaining to do after more rancid bologna emerged from the new book she wrote to bolster her VP bona fides, as she’s starting to face backlash with her appearances being canceled.
As you’ll no doubt recall, Noem recently decided to destroy a mangy, useless, unacceptably dangerous, rotten-on-the-inside piece of moldering trash on an apparent whim. But enough about her political career. She also murdered her frisky, fun-loving dog Cricketand everyone—with the possible exception of Donald Trump—is utterly repulsed by the story, which she (oh, sweet Jesus, what bichon frisé hell is this?) wrote down for posterity in a book.
But before the no-nonsense, action-oriented governor decided she had to shoot her pet or get off the pot, she was inventing stories in her head about her foreign policy experience. Turns out she’s not afraid of adorable pups or North Korean tyrants with bad haircuts. Which means, as Trump’s vice president, she’d be ready for anything!
RELATED STORY: Kristi Noem’s most public murder is her political career
As first reported in The Dakota ScoutNoem claims in her upcoming book, “No Going Back (to the Pet Store to Surrender This Dog, I’ll Just Shoot It),” that she once bravely stared down North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un while serving on the House Armed Services Committee.
Here’s the excerpt:
Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation and determination. My experiences on those many foreign trips made me a better member of Congress and a stronger governor. It allowed me to hone my deal-making skills, which play a crucial role in leadership.
The only problem with that story? It appears to be bullshit.
The Dakota Scout noted that Noem served on the House Armed Services Committee from 2013 to 2015. Noem visited China in 2014, but according to University of Notre Dame professor and North Korea expert George Lopez, after becoming North Korea’s leader in 2011, Kim didn’t leave the country until 2018.
“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the U.S. State Department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” Lopez told the publication. “What would have been so critical in his bag of tricks that he would have met with an American lawmaker, this one distinctively?”
Virginia Commonwealth University professor Benjamin Young was more blunt. He called Noem’s story “dubious,” telling the Dakota Scout, “There’s no way.”
In other words, she appears to have made up a silly lie in order to look tough. Sound familiar?
Well, it should, because this is what the Republican Party is now, and Noem’s new book might as well be its bible.
Of course, Noem, who’s already banned from roughly 14% of her own statemay soon be unwelcome in the other 86%, as this book appears to be a Chernobyl-level event for her career. But it’s important to remember that these particular anecdotes were specially curated in order to make her look more appealing to the MAGA base. Because the cruelty, as has often been stated, is the point. And the lies are just par for the course that Trump cheats on.
Predictably, Noem’s response to the doggie furor she singlehandedly sparked was literally to cry “fake news.“
You know how the fake news works,” Noem told Fox News—which was forced to pay $787 million in damages last year for airing actual fake news—in response to the outcry. “They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it. And that’s what’s happened in this case.
“I hope people really do buy this book and they find out the truth of the story because the truth of the story is that this was a working dog and it was not a puppy. It was a dog that was extremely dangerous.”
Was it, though? By her own account, Cricket appears to have been a happy-go-lucky hound that ate some chickens and briefly snapped at her when she tried to take away its lunch. That’s typical dog behavior. And she admitted she’d forced Cricket to wear an electronic collara cruel intervention that can lead to fear-based behaviors and aggression—much like a Trump rally speech. Sounds like the owner was the problem more than the dog.
Of course, in the before times, a politician who’d scored such an egregious own goal would have profusely apologized, sheepishly walked away, and perhaps even resigned in disgrace. But Trump has shown his party another way.
Trump’s one superpower has always been that he has absolutely zero shame—a trick he apparently learned from mentor and moral paragon Roy Cohn, who taught him to be the rotten bastard he is today. As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted in a piece on the 2019 documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” much of Trump’s current antisocial behavior was learned directly from Cohn, a key contributor to disgraced former Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts:
You see the glee Cohn derived from being an exception to the rules he enforced on weaker people. From him, Trump learned how, when he was in trouble, to change the subject by acting outrageously, to never apologize and always stay on the offense. When the Justice Department claimed that apartment buildings owned by the Trump family were discriminating against black renters, it was Cohn’s idea to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million.
Now that feral philosophy has metastasized to the rest of the GOP, and they’re running with it—though, as Noem’s recent dustup with truth and decency shows, it doesn’t work for everyone.
That said, the modern iteration of the GOP is built on a foundation of lies, deceit, cruelty, absurd denials, performative outrage—and pretty much nothing else. And Noem is more than just a bad apple; she’s emblematic of the deep moral rot at the heart of her party.
It’s a sad and frightening state of affairs, and given the craven reaction to Trump’s (alleged!) lawlessness from even the so-called “good” Republicansit may get worse before it gets better.
All we can do is continue to call out their lies, fakery, and cruelty, no matter how exhausting it gets. And vote (and donate and GOTVof course) before the lies and cruelty become a permanent part of our nation’s DNA.
RELATED STORY: Kristi Noem’s story of murdering her dog keeps getting worse
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