Why Kristi Noem Thought Puppy Murder Would Look Good on Her MAGA Resume

When Kristi Noem first bragged about shooting her puppy, Cricket, in the face, little did she know that, politically, she was shooting herself in the foot. Similarly, she surely did not expect that murdering her male goat because (shockingly) it had a strong goat smell and was thus “disgusting” would lead her hero, Donald Trump, to terminate Noem’s political life by saying he was “disgusted” with her. Of course, his disgust was not over the South Dakota governor’s callous brutality but a response to her cluelessness about “public relations.”

In retrospect, she was not crazy to assume that a story about her cruelty toward cute animals would be catnip to the sadistic Trump base. While an overwhelming majority of Americans were appalled by the killings, Trump supporters were pretty evenly divided on the issue. While the gamble to out-MAGA her competing VP contenders turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation, it is instructive to consider why it would have seemed a good idea in the first place.

That episode caught my attention because it vividly illustrates key features of contemporary conservative psychology. I expound on these more fully in my forthcoming book, Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America. Those defining traits include costly signaling, sadism, and disidentification with non-human animals.

In politics, a “costly signal” is a message that shows you are a tribal member so loyal that you will do or say something guaranteed to offend, horrify, and alienate the opposition. When Noem highlights the animal slaughter episode described in her book as a selling point, she is, in essence, claiming, “I’m so MAGA (and worthy to run alongside Trump) that I’ll kill my own dog and goat and brag about it. And I’m happy to drink all the liberal tears that will be shed over it and welcome their hatred!” In other words, such a message signals tribal loyalty so unwavering that one is willing to burn all bridges to tribal outgroups.

Some costly signals may be too expensive in the end.

While this attempt at costly signaling failed and became costly in the wrong way, it raises the question of what it is about the intended MAGA audience that made it seem like it would be an effective messaging plan to begin with. Even though some current and former Republicans expressed revulsion at Noem’s actions, it is notable that most of the conservatives who spoke out about it were anti-Trump apostates. Others, like Steve Bannon, Don Jr, and Trump, criticized Noem for making a tactical error. Bannon said bragging about killing a puppy was “too based.” Based, in MAGA slang, describes an appeal to the base. It is one that defies the putatively delicate sensibilities of liberals by being “politically incorrect,” which in Trump-world generally translates as sadistic, racist, and misogynist trolling or violent punching down at devalued outgroups. Doing so has largely been low-risk for those seeking to consolidate one’s status in the Trump cult. After all, the leader himself famously claimed he’d have impunity for murdering someone on Fifth Avenue. He has long been an advocate for cruelty and violence, such as placing alligators in a moat on the Southern border to shred the flesh of asylum seekers or shooting suspected shoplifters on sight.

Perhaps if she’d been male, Noem’s performative cruelty would have generated only liberal revulsion. While none of the Trump cult’s ladies’ auxiliary members, like Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, are especially warm and cuddly, animal abuse may be a form of cruelty that Republicans can accept only in men.

The puppy murder illustrates another quality intrinsic to MAGA identity: sadism, which is often expressed as a taste for humiliating domination, death threats, trolling with gratuitous puerile insults, and violent punishment and execution. The urge to be cruel is a trait that is usually coupled with the conviction that doing a bad thing means you are bad (like going after chickens instead of pheasants, in Cricket’s case) and, therefore, an evil creature that cannot change. Training or education to alter the qualities that lead to bad behavior is pointless. For humans, disloyalty to the cult leader is one of the worst MAGA sins for which the death penalty is often the go-to threat, as Mike Pence learned all too well. Beyond that, sometimes all it takes to be bad and earn torment is simply belonging to the wrong out-group, especially non-white immigrants.

One of the clearest examples of racialized sadism was Trump’s immigrant kidnapping program, which was the brainchild of the ex-president’s senior advisor, Stephen Miller. It bore the anodyne name of Family Separation. Under that program, babies and young children were literally torn from the arms of their asylum-seeking parents, some never to be seen again because no plans had ever been made to reunite the ruptured families. “We need to take away the children,” said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The aim, he explained, was to frighten away those contemplating making the perilous trip to the US. Once abducted by Trump immigration officials, many children languished in filthy and crowded holding cages for months, like the “animals” of Trump’s xenophobic imagination. “These aren’t people; these are animals,” he once declared about immigrants crossing the Southern border.

That rhetorical animalization has been central to the efforts of autocrats across the ages and aspiring ones like Trump to dehumanize their enemies, especially those who function as ethnic scapegoats. That strategy of devaluation only works for those who see non-human animals as more like things and less like living beings with rich cognitive capacities, deeply felt emotions, and complex inner lives. As I document in my book, that is an attitude much more common in conservatives and was clearly expressed in Kristie Noem’s justification for shooting Cricket, who was killed because she was “useless,” disposed of like a broken toaster.

Noem, like so many others on the Right, is the sort of fundamentalist Christian who interprets the Biblical mandate to exercise dominion as the right and necessity to subjugate and dominate other animals. From that perspective, animals are things to be used, exploited, or discarded, as with any other resource. That is a very different reading from the one liberal Christians take from the Bible – that dominion means that humans must be stewards of the natural world and care for other creatures.

While Trump has no affection for animals beyond those that end up on his dinner plate, he was initially hesitant to speak out about Noem’s killing spree. However, he threw her under the MAGA bus when the reviews came in – popularity being the magnetic north of his moral compass. After her ratings plummeted and her utility vanished, she was put out of his misery just as poor Cricket had been for Noem.

Nevertheless, she has adopted her mentor’s approach to bad reviews – denying the veracity of her own words. When asked on Fox to justify the murders of her puppy and goat, she simply declared the reports to be “fake news.” As with Trump, she insists that if one’s own words generate disapproval, the fault lies in those reporting it.