Donald Trump is nearing the time to make his running mate selection.
But now all hell is breaking loose.
And this Trump Vice-Presidential pick just made one bizarre confession.
A campaign biography turns into a career killer
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem didn’t run for President and endorsed Donald Trump early on.
The fact that Noem is a woman and a Governor who never imposed a COVID lockdown made her attractive to Trump in appealing to suburban female voters and Americans who are disenchanted by the coronavirus response.
But all that’s likely out the window with publication of Noem’s campaign memoir, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.
Politicians use books like this to weave in a story of how their unique biography shaped their political outlook and makes them qualified to lead.
But Noem’s book served to essentially end her chances of being picked as Donald Trump’s running mate.
That’s because for some reason Noem included two tales of blowing her family dog and Billy goat’s brains out.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem writes about killing her family dog
In the book, Noem described how she had to put down her family hunting dog named Cricket.
“Cricket was a wirehaired pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem wrote.
Noem wrote that Cricket had trouble behaving.
During a stop at someone else’s family farm, Cricket killed their chickens by “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.
The Governor said Cricket behaved like “a trained assassin”.
Noem described how the dog “whipped around to bite me” when she went to grab it.
The Governor said she settled up with the family by paying them “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.”
And in a bizarre and bitter passage, Noem wrote about the dog in harsh terms.
“I hated that dog,” Noem declared, saying Cricket proved “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” as well as “less than worthless as a hunting dog.”
That’s when Noem claimed she realized she had to kill Cricket.
“At that moment,” Noem stated. “I realized I had to put her down.”
Noem then described how she dragged Cricket over to a gravel pit and put the dog down with one blast from her shotgun.
“It was not a pleasant job,” Noem described, before adding “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Noem wasn’t finished
That same day, Noem also realized she needed to put down a male goat the family owned because it smelled bad and attacked her children.
Noem described the goat as “nasty and mean” and said that it smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” her kids.
Once again, Noem wrote that she “dragged him to a gravel pit” for its execution.
But the first shot didn’t put the goat down and Noem raced to get another shotgun shell and “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down.”
Noem’s book contains a clue as to why she would write these stories, as she said construction crews witnessed her killing the two animals.
If Trump picked her as his Vice President, it’s likely someone would have come forward.
Noem was practicing politics 101 to try and get out in front of a bad story by leaking it on her own terms.
But no one could figure out why Noem framed these stories as her being a cold blooded killer of dogs and goats rather than trying to weave an Old Yeller like tale that tugs at the heartstrings.
The backlash online – even from conservatives – was tremendous.
Noem tried to defend herself by claiming left-wing elites don’t understand farm life.
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years,” Noem wrote on X.
But no matter what, this story likely ends any chance Noem had of Trump picking her as his running mate.
