As an outspoken right-winger, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been a favorite at Newsmax. In December, for example, James Hirsen wrote a column gushing that “Noem’s name often appears near the top of the list of potential vice presidential candidates from whom former President Donald Trump could choose,” and that “she appears to be an A-list pick” and “has demonstrated that she has no timidity when it comes to challenging the status quo.” When she released a memoir that described how she killed a pet dog, she received a lot of criticism — but not at Newsmax, at least not at first. An April 27 article by Eric Mack tried to spin the controversy by suggesting that it benefits her VP prospects:
You take the most flak when you’re over the target, and it appears South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem may be directly over the target — if recent media attacks are any indication.
Media outlets like CNN and The Guardian joined the Democratic National Committee in blaring headlines denouncing Noem’s new book, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”
In “No Going Back” Noem recounts when she killed her pet dog named Cricket.
Noem may be pretty but she’s also tough. She is lashing back, saying the criticism from liberal elites lacks awareness of “time on a farm.”
“We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” Noem wrote on X in response to media attacks.
“Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”
Book sales have been soaring, and the governor has been quick to mention this fact.
“If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back,'” she posted on X.
The book is set for release on May 7, but pre-order sales have already made it a bestseller in three Amazon categories.
Noem supporters say the media venom is happening because she’s a top candidate to become former President Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate.
Yes, Mack really did try to spin it that way. But it quickly became clear that the anecdote backfired — so much so that Newsmax published an April 30 column by Michael Reagan pointing out as much:
Noem is releasing her memoir, “No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.”
There Noem describes the heartwarming tale concerning the time she took her 14-month–old dog named “Cricket,” which she called “less than worthless,” to the killing pit on her ranch and blew the dog’s brains out.
Now we know that on “Yellowstone” (Paramount Network) they’ve been wildly successful taking unwanted creatures to the train station to dispose of the bodies, but no one there is considering running for vice-president.
An important rule of thumb in politics states that if a candidate is on defense, the candidate is losing. Noem’s shaggy dog story is the Stalingrad of campaign anecdotes.
She obviously has an incredibly weak staff that evidently is too naive or too timid to push back against colossally bad ideas.
Trump and Republicans already have a big problem with suburban cat ladies who think GOP candidates are too heartless for a compassionate America.
There is no way “Headshot” Noem will appeal to a demographic that thinks cats are an adequate substitute for children.
Noem has also made herself a nationwide brunt of jokes.
Never a good look for a candidate. And rarely survivable. For details see Mike Dukakis.
Weirdly, Reagan portrayed this as a gaffe on a par with her not sufficiently hating transgender people enough by having “vetoed a bill banning ‘hemales’ from playing female sports.”
That was followed by a paywalled May 2 article by Marisa Herman admitting that the story “may have killed her shot at becoming Donald Trump’s running mate.” Still, Newsmax made sure to give a couple shots at playing cleanup anyway. A May 6 article touted her appearance on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax show:
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Newsmax that her new book, “No Going Back,” is about how Americans can get involved in politics and make their country better, but also about “tough decisions” she had to make in life, including putting down a dog she owned twenty years ago.
Speaking on Eric Bolling The Balance, Noem asserted, “a lot of the liberals are, and even some Republicans and some Democrats, are attacking me over a story that was in there, but the whole decision was twenty years ago, it was choosing between the safety of my little kids and the public and protecting them, versus a dangerous animal that was killing livestock and attacking people.”
“And, so I talk about that decision, and I put it in the book because I want them to know that most politicians, they hide from the truth. They run away from making tough decisions. And I don’t do either of those,” Noem continued. “I take my responsibility, I don’t ask anybody else to do the tough decisions and make those hard decisions for me.”
(UPDATE: The article didn’t mention that Bolling tried to help Noem play cleanup by asking if a book editor who was a “liberal plant” inserted those stories in the book to make her look bad. Noem didn’t bite, admitting the stories were her own.)
The next day, Noem appeared on a different Newsmax show, where another controversy from the book was brought up, which Noem feebly tried to do her own spin:
South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, who has come under fire recently for revelations in her new memoir, including controversies over a meeting she describes with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and her recollections of killing a hunting dog on her ranch, Tuesday on Newsmax defended the book as a “blueprint for the average American citizen.”
“It’s not a typical political book,” Noem told “Wake Up America.” “It takes some vulnerable stories from my life, some painful experiences, hard decisions … and lets people learn from them and then also what they can do to engage with their government.’
She added that most people can gather from the book that politicians in the past have “hid from the truth. They’ve run from making tough decisions. That’s just not me.”
But when show anchor Rob Finnerty pressed Noem on the controversy over her statements in the book on Kim Jong Un, and told her that he doesn’t “think you’re on the list” to become a running mate to former President Donald Trump, the governor insisted that she has had the part about the North Korean dictator changed.
[…]She also would not confirm the meeting after Finnerty asked her to specify when it happened.
“I’m asking if the meeting actually happened,” he asked her. “And I think if it did, you’d be able to confirm for me that yes, it did.”
“I’m not going to talk about my conversation,” she told him. “The average American citizen is more worried about the border. They’re more worried about what we see in the White House and a president that since January has gone out there and misled the American people over 150 times.”
Even host Finnerty didn’t seem to be buying that spin.
Still, that brouhaha blew over quickly enough that Newsmax devoted a May 30 article to her reaction to Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts.