Dem
51
GOP
49
Speaking of dogs, it was obvious to us that when the news broke about Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) shooting her dog, her VP hopes were officially done. Donald Trump does not care about dogs, per se, but he knows that many of his voters do. Further, he does not want a running mate who takes over news cycles, particularly with damaging news, and particularly due to that running mate's poor political judgment.
In the last couple of days, Trump campaign insiders have confirmed that Noem's goose is cooked. She was already a longshot, and her desperate attempt to pander to the former president finished the job of knocking her out of contention. So, she won't be getting out of South Dakota anytime soon.
Note, incidentally, that the dog-shooting story was just the final straw for Team Trump. Noem already had some serious black marks against her before that news broke:
Ok, we might have added that last one ourselves. But the rest were already major causes of concern for the Trump campaign, especially since Noem doesn't really bring any constituency with her, other than the ones Trump already has pretty well covered.
So, her VP hopes are over. And, in our view—and we briefly alluded to this on Sunday—her career is over, too. The way the story is told in Noem's book, she executed a puppy for... acting like a puppy. She made no serious effort, in her telling, to correct the behavior (say, hiring a dog trainer). And the things she described, with only one exception, perhaps, came nowhere close to out-of-bounds, behavior-wise. The possible exception is her claim that the dog bit her, but one dog bite is really not "time to put them down," especially when the bite apparently happened when she waded into a situation when the dog's instincts/cerebral cortex had taken over.
Various Noem-friendly media propagandists, like Sean Hannity, are trying to rehabilitate the Governor by somehow comparing her dog management to that of Joe Biden. Nice try, Sean, but the fact is that one dog was killed in a brutal fashion, while the other is still alive and (reportedly) happy. Further, the actual incident was bad enough, but... how soulless/tone deaf do you have to be to try to turn it into a political chit?
Noem is term-limited, and will be done serving as governor on Jan. 5, 2027. She's never again going to be a player in national politics; this dog story is going to linger longer and with a nastier stench than Mitt Romney's dog story. We hardly know the politics of South Dakota, but the two Senate seats are firmly in the hands of Republicans Mike Rounds and John Thune, and even if they step down, it's hard to accept that Noem could survive the primary that would ensue. Same goes for the state's at-large seat in the House; Dusty Johnson (R) is only 47, and will instantly become the favorite if one of the two senators does retire. If Noem's willing to pull a Jerry Brown, and run for a lower-on-the-ladder statewide job, then... maybe? But she seems to have an ego many orders of magnitude larger than Brown's and, again, she wants to be out of South Dakota. We just can't see a plausible path forward for her. (Z)