Even the US right draws the line at shooting puppies

Kristi Noem was tipped as a running mate for Donald Trump – until she released a memoir with some bizarre details.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem speaks before former US president Donald Trump takes the stage during a rally in Ohio in March. Picture: AFP

It’s common to watch politicians, under the intense pressure of constant public scrutiny, commit unforced errors that can cause serious harm to their careers. Cringe-making moments with bacon sandwiches, blood-curdling screams into the electoral void or weird-looking tank commander headgear have done for the ambitions of rising stars on either side of the Atlantic over the years.

But Ed Miliband, Howard Dean and Michael Dukakis – and many others – could at least claim that an unfortunate juxtaposition of unforeseeable circumstances and an immediate exigency had created the conditions for their undoing.

It is rare to watch a carefully planned, meticulously calculated exercise in self-advancement turn into a political self-immolation.

But that is the spectacle to which Americans have been treated in the past couple of weeks by a woman who, before she produced the box of matches and the lighter fuel, was considered an ascendant force in Donald Trump’s remade Republican Party.

Kristi Noem is the governor of South Dakota. She is very much a politician for our populist age. A youthful-looking 52-year-old blessed with a rugged sex appeal and enhanced by a warrior chic, she was raised on a family ranch in the pristine American landscape of the Dakotas.

And thanks to her natural talents and a facility for snappy conservative rhetoric, she moved quickly up the ladder of state and national politics. Elected to Congress in her thirties, while Trump was still doing reality TV, she staked out robust positions on abortion (against), oil production (for), immigration (against) and foreign interventions (against), and was elected her state’s governor in 2018.

As I mentioned in a recent column, her political style, looks and experience made her a natural potential vice-presidential nominee for Trump this year – though I did, I’m relieved to say, note that doubts about some aspects of her character would probably give him pause. And I didn’t even know about the dog.

This month, perfectly timed to hit national attention as Trump hosts auditions for his number 2, she published a memoir, No Going Back, in which she recounted her life story and its lessons for a nation looking urgently for strong leadership. Emphasising throughout her upbringing in the hard-work ethic of the American heartland and her readiness to make tough, even ruthless decisions, she recounted how she had dealt with a pesky family pet. Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer, had proven impossible to train, ruining a pheasant hunt, startling other dogs, and at one point attacking and killing one of her neighbour’s chickens. “I hated that dog,” she wrote.

Mr Trump with Ms Noem during the Buckeye Values PAC Rally. Picture: AFP

So, like a difficult campaign aide or a welfare-dependent illegal immigrant, Cricket had to go. Noem tells with cold detachment how she dragged the dog out to a gravel pit and shot it.

There is an alternative interpretation to the importance of emotional toughness on the farm: the importance of running as far away as possible from a psycho puppy-killer. America loves its farms but it loves its puppies more, and retribution has been swift. Even hardcore Maga types have pointed out that a bullet in the head is far from the only option for a troublesome pup. And while Trump himself has remained silent on the governor’s confession, aides have told reporters it is unlikely that he would want to have the rest of his presidential campaign dominated by questions about animal cruelty.

In any case, things soon got even worse for Noem. Elsewhere in the book, evidently eager to address the question that always faces heartland governors – their lack of foreign policy experience – she tells of a visit a few years ago to the Demilitarised Zone on the Korean peninsula and recalls a meeting with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. “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).”

Unfortunately, while the dog story was only too true, this one was the opposite. There had been no meeting, of course, and when questions were raised about the passage, the publisher pulled it from the book.

Ms Noem on a shooting trip. Picture: Supplied

Noem has spent the past few days getting excruciatingly grilled on national television, defending the canicide and trying to keep mum on the fictional Kim encounter, on the dubious ground of national security. Then on Wednesday she pulled out of all media events, citing a snowstorm in South Dakota.

There are two lessons from this little episode in self-harm for our polarised politics. First, the partisan bubble in which politics is now conducted is so tightly sealed that politicians can lose touch with the tastes and sentiments of the wider voting public. Noem’s decision to reveal her tough-on-dogs act seemed to her and her team like a good idea, in part because no one looked at it from the perspective of a normal voter as opposed to a hardcore, ruthlessness-admiring conservative. The left is guilty of this too, as evidenced by activists who seem to think calling for “Death to America” in protests on college campuses is somehow a smart political move.

Second, the Kim story fits a picture in which trust in partisan media has dwindled so much that politicians – again, on both sides – think they can say more or less whatever they like, true or false, because their side will believe them and dismiss anyone who takes issue with it as peddling “fake news”.

Noem’s dog days and DMZ dreams have shown us there are still some limits on both fronts. Trump once famously said he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. But even he never claimed he could shoot a puppy and get away with it.

The Times