Kristi Noem is in a tough spot. The best way to avoid having to tell Americans why you should still be on Donald Trump’s VP short list despite killing your dog is to not take your 14-month-old puppy to a gravel pit and fatally shoot it. The second best way is to not tell that story in your own book. Unfortunately, neither of those options is available to Noem, so she had to go with a third option: explain yourself in an incredibly sympathetic interview with Sean Hannity.
In a way, the South Dakota governor’s Wednesday-night appearance on Fox News could not have gone better. Hannity brought up Joe Biden’s bite-y dog twice and came close to suggesting that the president should have put down Commander. He ended the interview by not only encouraging viewers to purchase No Going Back, but explaining how to do so. “The book is available, by the way, online. You go to Amazon.com,” he said.
Best of all, Hannity offered no pushback as Noem hit her talking points. The governor argued that the “dog killer” debacle is all the “fake news” media’s fault:
“Well, Sean, you know how the fake news works. They leave out some or most of the facts of a story, they put the worst spin on it, and that’s what happened in this case.”
She claimed that 14-month-old Cricket wasn’t a “puppy”:
“Because the truth of this story is that this was a working dog, and it was not a puppy.”
Noem painted Cricket as a monster who enjoyed killing:
“It was a dog that was extremely dangerous; it had come to us from a family who had found her way too aggressive. We were her second chance. And the day she was put down was the day she massacred livestock that were part of our neighbors’. She attacked me. And it was a hard decision.
Farmers and ranchers, they expect it. They know that once an animal like this starts killing, and starts killing just because they enjoy it, that is a very dangerous animal.”
And Noem presented herself as a mama grizzly who had to protect her children (and the “small kiddos” who worked at her business?):
“I do hope people read the facts of the story and truly understand that I’m a mom, and at the time I had small children and a lot of small kiddos that worked around our business and people, and I wanted to make sure that they were safe. And that dogs that have this kind of a problem, that have been to training for months and still kill for fun, they are extremely dangerous, and a responsible owner does what they need to do and what the law will allow.”
Despite this capably delivered, MAGA-y spin, the interview probably won’t save Noem, because all she really did was double down on the original problem with the Cricket story. If Noem’s book included a story about her wrestling with the decision to put down a loved but dangerous hunting dog, then tearfully concluding that putting her down herself was the most humane option, it would’ve been controversial but maybe not career ending.
Instead, in the book, Noem reportedly emphasizes that Cricket was young and “having the time of her life.” She remarks, “I hated that dog” and calls Cricket “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.” Then she make the story even weirder by mentioning a botched attempt to put down her goat, and her confused daughter asking, “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Noem told Hannity “it was a hard decision” and claimed “I’m a dog lover.” But her broader point is still that Cricket was a real jerk and she wasn’t that torn up about taking out this canine super-predator. It seems Noem told a story to sound tough and folksy and wound up MAGA girlboss-ing too close to the sun.
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