Seth Tupper, South Dakota Searchlight
May 4, 2024
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks during the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention at the George R. Brown Convention Center on May 27, 2022 in Houston, Texas.(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem was in political freefall Friday as embarrassing revelations continued to emerge from the scrutiny of advance copies of her memoir, which doesn’t officially publish until Tuesday.
Noem was already reeling from near-universal backlash against her disclosure in the book that she shot and killed a dog named Cricket and a billy goat years ago — the dog for its failures on a hunting excursion and its attacks on a neighbor’s chickens, and the goat for chasing after Noem’s children and smelling bad.
Thursday and Friday, news emerged from outlets including Politico and The Dakota Scout of inaccuracies in Noem’s book, the title of which — “No Going Back” — is now ripe with irony. The most glaring inaccuracy is Noem’s recounting of a meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un during her time in Congress — a meeting that never happened.
“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un,” Noem wrote. “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).”
The Dakota Scout published a story Thursday casting doubt on the meeting. Noem’s spokesman, Ian Fury, eventually said the anecdote was one of “two small errors” in the book that were the fault of others.
“This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor,” Fury said, according to the Scout. “Kim Jong Un was included in a list of world leaders and shouldn’t have been.”
Yet there seems to be no way Noem could’ve been unaware of the errors. She’s been promoting the book for weeks, there is no other writer credited in the book besides her, and she’s already voiced an audio version of the book.
The Scout also questioned Noem’s anecdote in the book about canceling a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron over Noem’s dislike of his comments about the Israeli-Hamas war. The French president’s office released a statement that Macron had never extended a “direct invitation” to Noem for a meeting, the Scout reported, but the office left open the possibility that the two could have been scheduled to attend the same event.
Politico reported on a story Noem related in the book about a 2021 conversation with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Noem wrote that Haley, who would go on to unsuccessfully seek the Republican presidential nomination, “threatened” Noem politically. A spokesperson for Haley told Politico that Haley had called to encourage Noem, and “how she would twist that into a threat is just plain weird.”
Politico also reported that a Colorado county Republican group canceled a Saturday fundraiser Noem was scheduled to headline, after the group received death threats and information about a planned protest related to Noem’s treatment of animals.
Reacting to the cascade of negative news, political science professor Jon Schaff of Northern State University in Aberdeen said Noem’s short-term national ambitions “have been weakened, considerably.” Until recently, Noem had been widely considered to be a potential running mate for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
But Schaff said it’s too early to tell what it all means for Noem long-term. He said she is popular in South Dakota, and it would be naive to count her out in future races, such as a U.S. Senate race in the eventuality of a retirement by Sen. John Thune or Sen. Mike Rounds. Thune is 63 years old, Rounds is 69 and Noem is 52
“Rounds and Thune won’t be there forever,” Schaff said.
Meanwhile, Dan Ahlers, executive director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, said the negative news is unlikely to end Noem’s career, given that past scandals have not seemed to hurt her. Those scandals have included published allegations of an affair with former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski, accusations of misusing the state airplane, and allegedly intervening to help her daughter earn a real estate appraiser’s license.
“These things don’t end any of these Republican politicians’ careers anymore,” Ahlers said. “They end up raising more money and smelling like roses.”
Noem went on “Hannity” on Fox News on Wednesday and blamed “fake news” for the fallout from the dog and goat stories. This weekend, she’s scheduled to attend a Trump campaign donor retreat in Florida, according to Politico. Sunday, she’s scheduled to appear on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
“We’ll get into the controversies surrounding her upcoming memoir,” said a Friday tweet from the show.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on Facebook and Twitter.
'Ugly' Noem’s dog killing was bad — but to really understand her, consider her billy goat
Seth Tupper, South Dakota Searchlight
May 3, 2024
(Goat image: USDA photo by Scott Bauer. Noem image: David Bordewyk/South Dakota NewsMedia Association)
Since Gov. Kristi Noem’s disclosure of her farmyard killing spree, everybody’s been focused on Cricket.
That’s understandable. Cricket was a 14-month-old dog. It’s easy to imagine her head jutting out of a pickup window, hair and tongue blowing in the wind. Like many dogs, Cricket probably had a personality and other human-like qualities that we so often attribute to canine companions.
Noem shot and killed Cricket on some undisclosed date years ago for being bad at pheasant hunting and good at chicken hunting. The moral, Noem wrote, is that leaders deal with problems immediately. That makes her a “doer,” she claimed, not an “avoider.”
That’s pure bunk, as millions of people have pointed out in an avalanche of criticism since The Guardian obtained an early copy and revealed some of the contents of Noem’s ironically named memoir, “No Going Back.” The relevant pages have since been shared with South Dakota Searchlight, which requested an advance copy but was ignored; the book’s official publication date is next Tuesday.
Again, the focus on Cricket makes sense, because we can all see that Noem could’ve taken the dog to a shelter and given it another chance at life.
But if you’ll hear me out, I want to tell you why Cricket’s fate is the wrong place to focus your attention.
If you really want to understand Kristi Noem, you need to consider the goat.
‘I spotted our billy goat’
After Noem made the death march to her farm’s gravel pit, where she shot Cricket, she was apparently still in an uncontrollable rage.
“Walking back up to the yard, I spotted our billy goat,” Noem wrote.
The nameless goat’s only sin in that moment was being in Noem’s field of view.
Noem blames ‘fake news’ for backlash against her killing a dog and goat
In the book, Noem tried to justify her snap decision to kill the goat by writing that it “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them,” leaving them “terrified.” The animal also had a “wretched smell.”
But apparently none of that had been a big enough problem to do anything about it. Not until Noem got angry enough to kill a dog and decided she needed to kill again.
Noem says she “dragged” the goat to the gravel pit, “tied him to a post,” and shot at him. But the goat jumped when she shot.
“My shot was off and I needed one more shell to finish the job,” she wrote.
She studiously avoided saying she wounded the goat with the first shot, but that’s the implication.
“Not wanting him to suffer,” she added — apparently experiencing her first twinge of feeling, after saying that killing the dog was not “pleasant” — “I hustled back across the pasture to the pickup, grabbed another shell, hurried back to the gravel pit, and put him down.”
The goat story not only reflects a disturbing lack of self-control, but also raises a question of law.
The crime of animal cruelty
Noem has defended her shooting of the dog, citing legal justification for her actions. She’s likely referencing a state law that exempts from the definition of animal cruelty “any reasonable action taken by a person for the destruction or control of an animal known to be dangerous, a threat, or injurious to life, limb, or property.”
Cricket killed a neighbor’s chickens and “whipped around to bite” Noem when she intervened; therefore, by Noem’s logic, her killing of Cricket was legally defensible. She’s probably right, legally speaking.
What Noem’s shot heard around the world says about her approach to problems
But what about the goat?
Sure, it chased children, butted them, and smelled bad. “So, a goat,” Stephen Colbert deadpanned during his Monday monologue on “The Late Show,” speaking for everybody who’s ever been around goats. If those traits meet the legal definition of “dangerous, a threat, or injurious to life, limb, or property,” killing any goat would always be legally justified.
In reality, what Noem did to the goat — dragging it to a gravel pit, tying it to a post, shooting at it once, leaving to get another shell, and shooting it again — sounds an awful lot like the legal definition of animal cruelty. That definition in South Dakota law is “to intentionally, willfully, and maliciously inflict gross physical abuse on an animal that causes prolonged pain, that causes serious physical injury, or that results in the death of the animal.”
Alas, cruelty to animals is a Class 6 felony, and lower-class felonies like that carry a seven-year statute of limitations in South Dakota. We don’t know exactly what year it was when Noem shot her dog and goat. She gave a clue in the book when she wrote that her children came home on the school bus the day of the killings and one of them asked, “Where’s Cricket?” Noem didn’t say how she responded, and all of her children are now grown.
If that was more than seven years ago, the goat killing is probably not prosecutable. But no prosecution could do more damage to Noem’s reputation and career than she’s already done to herself by writing about her animal bloodthirst.
As Noem wrapped up her bloody tale in the book, she wrote that being a leader is often “messy” and “ugly.”
In her case, it certainly is.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on Facebook and Twitter.
Kristi Noem just won’t stop talking about killing her dog
The South Dakota governor recounted the episode to show that she is tough enough to face “difficult, messy and ugly” tasks. But many in both parties are horrified.
Staff writer
May 3, 2024
First, South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem wrote about killing her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in her soon-to-be-released book, “No Going Back.”
Then, over the course of three separate days, the Republican posted on social media about killing her dog — missives that ranged from book promotion to defensive explanation to, finally, blame-the-media spin.
And on Wednesday, Noem appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where the two devoted five minutes to Noem’s late wirehair pointer, as a befuddled Hannity tried to give Noem — who wrote about dragging her dog out to a gravel pit and shooting her — the benefit of the doubt. “Is there a difference which way you put a dog down?” he asked. “I’m not really sure.”
In short, Noem just can’t stop talking about killing her dog — much to the collective confusion of horrified observers.
“As the saying goes, if you find yourself in a hole, stop murdering your puppy — and stop digging,” said Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America” and a former Obama administration official.
The controversy started April 26, when the Guardian published details from her upcoming political memoir — the sort of obligatory hardcover intended to juice her chances of emerging as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick. Ironically, it seems to have done the exact opposite
The Guardian recounted that, in the book, Noem describes her dog, still nearly a puppy, as “a trained assassin” with an “aggressive personality.” Unable to train Cricket, Noem recounts watching as the dog, on the way home from a pheasant hunt, attacks a local family’s chickens, grabbing “one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.”
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes of Cricket, who she says then tried to bite her. “At that moment, I realized I had to put her down.”
Noem also writes of how — perhaps feeling emboldened after killing Cricket — she then decided to kill a “nasty and mean” family goat, dragging it to the same gravel pit where Cricket met her demise. But the goat jumped as Noem shot it, forcing the Republican governor to return to her truck for another shell.
The scene of slaughter ends with Noem’s kids getting off the school bus, and her daughter asking, “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Noem seems to have recounted the episode as something of a parable, intended to show both that she is tough enough to face “difficult, messy and ugly” tasks and authentic enough to tell the truth about it.
But even before Noem’s recent controversy, people close to Trump privately said she was always a long shot to be his running mate, citing assorted “baggage” — and that was before canicide got added to her vetting files.
Yet Noem persisted, plowing ahead with her tale of the untrainable dog.
On the Friday that the Guardian story came out, Noem wrote a post on X that was part explanation and part book promotion.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” she wrote, in a missive that included a link to preorder her book. “Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”
Then on Sunday, when the intervening two days had made clear she had a political crisis on her hands, she weighed in again about killing Cricket — this time with an even lengthier social media post aimed squarely at damage control.
“I can understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch,” wrote Noem, who went on to describe herself as an “authentic” leader who doesn’t “shy away from tough challenges.”
And finally, on Thursday, she returned to the topic again, this time squarely through a “fake news” lens.
“Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted spin,” she wrote, linking to her Hannity interview. “I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock. I chose my kids.”
But the morbid fascination with the Noah’s ark worth of animals Noem has talked about putting down — three horses, a goat, a dog — transcends the so-called liberal media. On Thursday, for instance, a bipartisan group of lawmakers responded to the news by forming the Congressional Dog Lovers Caucus.
And even would-be allies have been left scratching their heads — not just that Noem killed her dog, but that she continues to talk about it, holding up the gravel pit executions as a character reference for her leadership chops.
“It’s hard to imagine a universe where bragging about shooting your 14-month-old puppy increases your brand value,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) wrote in a text. “I’ve known hunters who accidentally or impulsively shot their hunting dog, but I’ve never known anyone who bragged about it or considered it noble in any way.”
Others, including fellow conservatives, were less generous.
“Why … would you write about this in a book and flex on it?” wondered radio personality Dana Loesch. “That doesn’t look tough. It looks stupid.”
“Not ideal,” Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said to laughter on his video podcast. “I read that and I’m like: ‘Who put that in the book?’ I was like, ‘Your ghost writer must really not like you if they’re going to include that one. That was rough.’”
Even Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), whose past includes a more benign dog incident, weighed in.
“I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me,” Romney told HuffPost. (Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was dogged by a story of Romney family lore — the 1983 vacation the clan took with Seamus, their Irish setter, strapped in his carrier to the roof of the station wagon for 12 hours).
In repeatedly returning to the tale, Noem also opened herself up to additional criticism, including charges that her story has changed to portray her in a more flattering light. A community note at the bottom of her Thursday X post, in which readers are allowed to add additional context, reads that “Noem’s description of why she shot Cricket has morphed.”
The note says that in her book, Noem writes that she killed Cricket because the dog was untrainable for pheasant hunting and killed the neighboring chickens. It adds that when criticized, “Noem altered her story” — going from claiming that Cricket snapped at her to claiming that Cricket actually bit her to claiming that Cricket had a biting history and was a “danger to children.”
A person close to Noem rejected the charge of revisionist history, pointing to the line in her book that reads, “Cricket was untrainable and, after trying to bite me, dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.” Cricket regularly came in contact with Noem’s young kids, this person said, arguing the sentence shows that Noem had always considered the safety of her children when she made the decision to kill Cricket.
Noem does have her defenders. She is slated to headline the annual Brevard County Republicans dinner in Florida this month, and Rick Lacey, the county party chair, said he has already had interest from 200 people and is worried about selling out the space, which can hold about 500.
“This happens all the time,” Lacey said, referring to putting down dogs known for biting people, “but I guess if you’re a Republican governor with national prospects, it becomes a bigger issue.”
Stu Loeser, a longtime Democratic staffer and strategist who specializes in crises, noted he shares “a house on the Hudson with a Havanese and we are both horrified.” But, from a crisis communications perspective, he argued that Noem is never going to be able to change her detractors’ minds — but that she may get some credit for continuing to largely stand by her original story.
For now, the controversy shows no signs of abating, in part because Noem is promoting her book, which comes out Tuesday.
As part of her publicity tour, the South Dakota governor is slated to appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
An X post by the “Face the Nation” account said that in addition to other issues, “we’ll get into the controversies surrounding her upcoming memoir.”
Marianne Levine contributed to this report.
By Ashley ParkerAshley Parker is Senior National Political Correspondent for The Washington Post. She has been part of two Post teams that won Pulitzer Prizes — in 2018 for National Reporting, and in 2022 for Public Service on the Jan. 6 attacks. She joined The Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times. She is also an on-air contributor to NBC News/MSNBC. Twitter
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