“Instead of ‘fixing’ politics by ‘going back to the good old days,’ let’s step into the chaos and move the country forward.” - Governor Kristi Noem, No Going Back
A 2021 New York Times article about Kristi Noem includes a telling line from a Republican strategist about the South Dakota governor’s strategy for raising her national profile: “It’s a contest about who can trigger the media and Democrats the most.”
Fair to say that the governor got her wish this week, as an excerpt from her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How to Move America Forward, recounts the time she assassinated a puppy.
Generally speaking, dog execution doesn’t play well with Democrats. Nor, apparently does it seem to engender much praise from fellow Republicans. “Totally crazy and appalling,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich the reporter Olivia Nuzzi, when asked about it.
Even replicants Kari Lake and Ron DeSantis took to social media to post pictures of their own dogs and to encourage animal adoption.
(She shot a goat, too, but nobody cares about goats.)
Noem’s political instincts are generally excellent, so why did she include an anecdote sure to upset so many people? Because the book she wrote is for an audience of one, a former president famous for disparaging man’s best friend.
“Like a dog,” is Trump’s all-purpose insult. “He died like a dog,” said Trump following the assassination of ISIS Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Marco Rubio was “sweating like a dog” in a debate, despite the fact that dogs do not have sweat glands. He once said Virginia governor Ralph Northam “choked like a dog” and, at various times, described General Stanley McChrystal, Glenn Beck, and Erick Erickson as being “fired like a dog.”
“Donald is not a dog fan,” his first ex-wife, Ivana, recounted in her memoir, Raising Trump.
Noem’s new book is more than just a fun anecdote about offing a dog. I’ve read the free sample because there’s no chance I’m actually to purchase or read the thing in its entirety.
Here’s what I can report: these opening pages are a familiar mishmash of political mumbo jumbo, with a strong emphasis on how much the woman, who has been a politician since 2006, does not want to be a politician.
“I do not want to be a politician,” she writes.
Yet, in politics she remains, now with her eye firmly fixed on serving in a potential second Trump administration.
Trump is a fan of Noem. In fact, he blurbed No Going Back: “It’s a winner,” wrote Trump. “You’ve got to read it!”
Anybody want to take bets on whether Trump read it?
Noem’s fealty to the former president is fulsome; she once presented him with a replica of Mt. Rushmore with his face engraved on it beside George, Tom, Abe, and Teddy.
When introducing Trump at a rally in 2018, she said that she knew “Donald Trump would carry South Dakota in his heart from this day forward.”
Anybody want to take bets on whether South Dakota fills as much space in Trump’s heart as coronary plaque?
So, the question. Did Noem’s bid to attract Trump’s eye work?
The dog anecdote obviously received a ton of coverage this week, but to me the interesting story is that she felt so compelled to prove her cruel bona fides to a man who interprets cruelty as strength that she and her ghostwriter included it at all.
At this point, it’s banal to say the cruelty is the point with Trump. But it’s only banal because he has so inured us to pettiness, grubbiness, and meanness for its own sake that it now barely registers with a population alternately exhausted and enthralled with the man swaddled in emperor’s clothes.
Trump is no doubt watching how Noem responds to the fusillade of fury aimed in her direction. Will she back down or double down? Her weird follow-up statement did neither, instead relying on a stilted legalistic defense for a moral crime, writing “The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down.”
I’ll be honest. There have been many mornings when I have come downstairs in the morning to find my carpet covered in dog vomit, and thought to myself, “I’m going to take that fucker out to the gravel pit.”
But I don’t do it. Because I don’t have a gravel pit. And because I don’t have the moral center of a sociopath.
Obviously nobody knows who Trump will select as his VP pick, other than we know that person will be a bootlicker of the highest order. How does that jibe with a woman who writes in her new book that “The word compliant has never been used to describe my personality.”
So why do you want to work for a man who demands complete - and one-sided - loyalty?
No Going Back is a paean to making tough choices and doing the right thing. Recounting her days as a congressperson she writes, “Sure I made mistakes, and I still do, but I was not about to abandon my values and what I knew to be true.”
So, what are those values? Do they allow you to serve a man held liable for sexual assault? Fraud? Who is now facing the first of several criminal trials? A thrice-divorced serial adulterer who stood by as rioters threatened to hang his first vice president? I have no desire to step into the chaos with somebody whose ethics allow you to turn a blind eye for such a man as Trump. I’d trust a dog’s values over yours.
The most frightening part of this for me is her being vice president to a man who, uh, isn’t in the best of shape let’s say. She knows his days are numbered and she’s just waiting.
I haven't forgotten about the innocent goat, even if no one else cares. 🐐🐕