One incident in Kristi Noem’s personal résumé reportedly secured her a plum role in President Donald Trump’s administration.
In her 2024 memoir No Going Back, Noem admitted to shooting her 14-month-old puppy Cricket, claiming the female dog had an “aggressive personality.”
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling Cricket “worthless.” Of the fatal shot she fired two decades ago, Noem wrote, “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.” She then buried the puppy in a gravel pit.
New excerpts from the forthcoming book Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program by NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley claim that Trump had actually considered selecting Noem to be his vice president in 2024, before locking in JD Vance.
Noem, now 54, was eliminated from the short list after the release of her book in May 2024 and the subsequent backlash that followed the revelations of the cold-hearted shooting of her puppy.
Ainsley’s book, as seen by The Atlantic, reports that many observers believed the outrage and humiliation after the shooting would terminate her chance of scoring a post in the Trump administration.
However, the book reveals that “Trump actually saw this particular biographical detail as an asset in his Homeland Security Secretary—it was one of the reasons he chose her,” according to the magazine.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Noem was sworn in as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in January last year, and has become the public face of the divisive ICE raids across the U.S. She previously served as the governor of South Dakota.
The dog-shooting incident has continued to haunt Noem, and was a recurring theme in a parody of her work leading ICE raids in an episode of South Park.
The hit comedy show depicted Noem as an ICE agent in full glam who loves posing for the camera, killing puppies, using Botox, and arresting anyone suspected of being Hispanic.
The episode ended with the cartoon Noem going on a shooting rampage in a pet store, firing off over 60 rounds, leading to puppy carnage.
Noem addressed the late Cricket on the New York Post’s MAGA-friendly Pod Force One podcast with Miranda Devine last September.
The Republican defended shooting the puppy, and confirmed she also killed a “disgusting, musky, rancid” male goat who “loved to chase” her children.
“The dog was actively killing animals for fun, had been massacring chickens and then had tried to bite me and attack me,” Noem told Devine. “That is something that happens from time to time, and keeping children and people safe is incredibly important.”
Noem added, “At that time we had little kiddos around every single day… I knew I had to take responsibility for the situation.”
The DHS secretary said she put the dog-shooting incident in her book in order to be transparent about making “hard decisions,” and knew it had been weaponized against her.
“I absolutely love animals, I’ve always had dogs, I still have a dog that goes everywhere with me, and that situation there was hard,” she said.
Trump’s less-than-friendly relationship with dogs has long been noted. He is the first president since William McKinley not to have one, and the first president since Andrew Johnson not to have any White House pets. He has also used “like a dog” as a derogatory term, including “choked like a dog,” for among others Mitt Romney, and “died like a dog,” for the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Ironically, a U.S. military dog was part of the operation to capture or kill al-Baghdadi, and Trump misgendered it as male.
