No one can prove President Harry Truman actually said "if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," but the quote is so apt it doesn't really matter.
A rising Republican star has now tried to refashion this maxim for the MAGA era: If you want to get to Washington, tell everyone you shot your dog.
Pundits have long tipped South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem in the race for Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee. Rarely seen pictured without a gun and having made her name mocking Covid-19 restrictions, Noem is beloved among Trump supporters for being a quick-to-give-offense heartland conservative who doesn't suffer liberals gladly. But after the Guardian scooped a copy of her new book, her national career may go to the dogs.
Her book offers the sad tale of Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer, in an attempt to prove Noem is willing to do things that are "difficult, messy and ugly." Noem says the mutt turned out to be unruly and untrainable, once ruining a hunt by "chasing all those birds and having the time of her life," according to the Guardian. After the dog got out of Noem's truck and killed some chickens belonging to a local family, Noem said she realized, "I had to put her down." So she took Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her dead. "It was not a pleasant job," she wrote, according to the Guardian. "But it had to be done."
This tragic tale has a twist — Noem said she then twigged that it was also time to dispatch a nasty, smelly goat that her family owned. She dragged the beast to a gravel pit and took aim. She had to retreat to her truck and get a second shell after it survived the first blast.
It says something about modern American politics that Noem believed that boasting about cruelty to animals was a winner. She was clearly posing as tough and politically incorrect and implying that she'd be a scourge of the Washington deep state. She's tried to catch Trump's eye before -- when he was in office she gifted him a model of Mount Rushmore with his head on it alongside the great presidents.
But in this case Noem came across as cruel. She tried to defuse the crisis by explaining that tough decisions happen on a farm. And she's right to an extent. Country folk don't always see sense in paying huge vet bills when the end comes for a domestic animal. If dogs attack livestock and fowl, they can face a grisly fate. But Noem surely had other options — like adoption. Humans can also take responsibility for securing their dogs in vehicles. And dogs don't train themselves.
Noem's allies in politics and conservative media are trying to spin the whole thing as yet another outrage that's offended so-called woke, soft liberals and media elitists who don't understand "real Americans." "Life is a little different in rural America," Rep. Dusty Johnson, Noem's fellow South Dakotan said.
But Noem is in political trouble. For one thing, she's always going to be a punchline as a pooch killer. And while Trump is reputed to dislike dogs, even he might balk at puptricide. If there's one thing he hates, it's being overshadowed. He won't want the tail wagging the dog, so he's hardly likely to nominate a VP who is meaner and tougher than him.
Putting a woman on the ticket would usually appeal to female, suburban and moderate voters whom Trump has a habit of alienating. But Noem's tale of canine frontier justice isn't going to play well in America's dog-walking suburbs.
