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      No Going Back: Kristi Noem and other Trump veepstakes also-rans

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      Donald Trump will never tap Kristi Noem to be his running mate. Indeed, she may never have had a real shot, but in the past few weeks her literary efforts have certainly helped torch whatever dreams she had of living in government housing, complete with Secret Service detail, a heartbeat from the Oval Office.Last weekend, at a vice-presidential cattle call, Trump failed to summon Noem to the stage. She reportedly left early. But at least she made it to Mar-a-Lago for a brief namecheck from Trump. Two other supposed vice-presidential hopefuls, Tulsi Gabbard and Ben Carson, failed to elicit even a mention. As it happens, like Noem, they have campaign books to sell.No Going Back, Noem’s memoir, dwells in a hell of its own, its fires stoked by her stunning story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, and an unnamed goat. The resultant controversy will be a tale for the political ages but more amazing still is that Noem simply refuses to say sorry. In her book, she writes that if elected president herself, the first thing she’d do “is make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds”, adding: “Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.” Talk about twisted.This is not the top table. In The Perilous Fight, Carson manages to argue for a nationwide abortion ban at a time when the US has never been more pro-choice, while Trump, seeking to escape a political trap, unfurls the banner of states’ rights. Way to read the runes, Dr Ben.For Love of Country is Gabbard’s bid for relevance. A former Democratic congresswoman, she is now a Fox News regular. She aims to feed the beast but may be consumed by it. Or, more likely, something worse: ignored.For unvarnished self-destruction, Noem wears the crown and will for some time to come. More than two weeks after the Guardian broke news of her cruelty toward defenseless animals and willingness to boast about it, she remains in the public eye, a punchline for daytime and late-night TV, a spectacle without a clue. On a dimwitted book tour, her attempts to sell her work double as a prolonged act of self-immolation.When you cause your seven-year-old to ask, “Where’s Cricket?” – and then print the tale in a mass-market hardback – you have a problem. But when it is revealed that in order to commit the story to print you dismissed the objections of editors and advisers, you are walking where most candidates dare not tread.A Politico headline blared: Kristi Noem’s Team Told Her to Nix the Dog Story Two Years Ago. The site added: “It would have violated the first rule of campaign memoirs: Do no harm.”Some publicity is just bad. Ask Trump about the Access Hollywood tape, about groping women, which nearly cost him the 2016 election. He also overdid the “best sex ever” gambit, regarding a New York Post headline about his extra-marital adventures. Trump now spends his days as a criminal defendant, on trial thanks to alleged affairs, passing gas and getting slapped with contempt sanctions and the threat of jail.Noem has not progressed quite that far. But with her tale of killing set to ring through the ages, when it came to a quite separate unforced error even her publisher threw her to the wolves.“At the request of Governor Noem, we are removing a passage regarding Kim Jong-un from her book No Going Back, upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and eBook editions,” Center Street announced. “Further questions about the passage should be referred to the author.”Such questions may not get straight answers. Noem refuses to say she never met the North Korean dictator. Pro-tip: visiting England doesn’t mean you had tea with the king.View image in fullscreenCampaign trail books often come with awkward subtitles. Noem’s is: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward. Catchy. Carson is not to be outdone. Underneath his own jaunty banner – Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family – the retired neurosurgeon, 2016 Republican primary contender and former US housing secretary offers heartfelt jeremiads and dubious blurbs. Apart from that … not much to help his cause.Carson calls for a national abortion ban, writing: “The battle over the lives of unborn children is not yet finished. The practice continues in many more states.”Said differently, Carson thinks it’s time New York was more like Mississippi. Polling and election results suggest that’s not a popular stance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarson’s book jacket is graced by Tucker Carlson and Franklin Graham. Tucker’s gonna Tucker. Billy Graham’s son has threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they criticize Trump. Mary Miller, a member of Congress from Illinois, also praises Carson, offering this nugget of wisdom: “It is important to stand strong against the woke cultural tide at work to water down the importance of the traditional family, and I applaud Dr Carson for calling attention to this issue.”It’s always worth repeating that Miller once had this to say: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”Carson dedicates his book to “the strong traditional families that provide the solid foundation of our nation”. He bashes pornography but is of course silent about Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, and Karen McDougal, the Playboy model, who claim affairs with Trump.Last and least of the three would-be VPs, Gabbard delivers an awkward mix of memoir and screed. She grew up in Hawaii and served in Iraq. Her father was a Republican until he became a Democrat. Convenience may be a family brand.In 2020, Gabbard ran against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, then endorsed him. Now she takes a cudgel to the man and a flamethrower to her old party. As to be expected, she attacks Hillary Clinton over comments about Gabbard and Russia. Once again, Gabbard gets her facts wrong. Clinton never called her a “Russian asset”.Gabbard reportedly turned down an offer to be Robert Kennedy Jr’s running mate. She won’t be Trump’s VP but a cabinet slot isn’t out of the question.Generally, campaign books endeavor to simultaneously show enough leg and sanitize a wannabe’s ambition, aiming to make a contender interesting without giving too much away. But such memoirs can still say and do plenty.Think of The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama’s profession of political faith from 2006, used to develop themes that would underlie his 2008 White House run. Promise Me Dad, Biden’s memoir, burnished his image as a warm uncle, put the memory of Beau Biden, his late son, front and center, and provided a foundation for success in 2020.Now, on the Republican side, JD Vance is a leading contender to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, brought him to national prominence and eventually a Senate seat for Ohio. Noem, Carson and Gabbard are nowhere near that league.
      No Going Back is published in the US by Center Street
      The Perilous Fight is published in the US by HarperCollins
      For Love of Country is published in the US by Regnery More

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      Morning After the Revolution review: a bad faith attack on ‘woke’

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      Writing on Substack in 2021, Nellie Bowles described some of the less attractive qualities that motivated her work as a reporter: “I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. One easy path toward the top of the list … is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple of years, that desire for attention … propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon.”Bowles is married to Bari Weiss, a former editor on the opinion section of the New York Times whose furious resignation letter earned her encomiums from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr.But Bowles wrote that her decision to convert to the faith of her Jewish wife had actually softened her approach to journalism: “I want to cultivate my empathy not my cruelty. I am trying to go back to being closer to the mirror than the knife.”However, her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, is dazzling proof she is completely incapable of changing her approach to her profession.Bowles is a former tech reporter for outlets including the Guardian and the New York Times. For many reporters, the decision to write a book comes from wanting to dig deeper into a particular subject, or a desire for freedom from the restrictions of one’s former employer. For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations.Here are a few fine examples: “The best feminists of my generation were born with dicks.” This is the author’s jaunty description of trans women, who, she informs us, are “the best, boldest” and “fiercest feminists”, who unfortunately – according to her – have concluded “that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting”.On the ninth page of Bowles’s introduction, meanwhile, readers realize how much we must have underestimated the universal impact of the movement to Defund the Police. Did you know, for example, that “if you want to be part of the movement for universal healthcare … you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice”?Bowles identifies a similar problem with marriage equality: “If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage … then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week.”The wilder the idea, the more likely Bowles is to include it, almost always in a way that can never be checked. To prove the vile effect of wokeness on the entire news business, she informs us that colleagues “at major news organizations” have “told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super-racist. Worrying about plastic in the water is transphobic.” And a “cohort” took it “as gospel when a nice white lady said that being on time and objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief”.Writing about a tent city in Echo Park, Los Angeles, Bowles explains why nobody living there was interested in a free hotel room: “Residents could not do drugs in the rooms. And the rooms were, of course, indoors. People high on meth and fentanyl prefer being outdoors, with no rules, with their friends.”Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.Intelligent people know three essential facts about the debate over whether children under 18 should have access to hormones or surgery to make their bodies conform to the gender in which they think they belong.First, a large majority of trans people of all ages never take hormones or get surgery. Second, nearly all of those who do choose to use medicine to alter their bodies report a dramatic improvement in personal happiness. Third, a very small number of those who have undergone surgery or taken hormones to block puberty do change their minds and opt for de-transition.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNaturally, Bowles mentions none of those facts. According to her narrative, “the transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless … I don’t think this was planned or orchestrated. The movement simply pivoted.”No mention, of course, of polls conducted by Christian nationalists and their allies which determined that the best new fundraising tool would be an all-out attack on trans people, including the denial of their very existence, as well as the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country to make this tiny minority as miserable as possible.Instead, Bowles wants us to believe the debate is dominated by websites you might not have heard of, like Fatherly, which asserts: “All kids, regardless of their gender identity, start to understand their own gender typically by the age of 18 to 24 months.” One parent who appeared on PBS in 2023 is equally important in Bowles’s book, because she said her child started to let her parents know “she was transgender really before she could even speak”.Needless to say, Bowles is horrified that as America became more aware of the existence of trans people, the number of clinics available to treat them grew to 60 by 2023. Then she makes another remarkable claim: “If a parent resists” medical changes requested by a child, “they can and do lose custody of their child.”Is that true? I have no idea. If Bowles had written that sentence in the Times or the Guardian, her editor would most certainly have requested some sort of proof. Fortunately for her – but unfortunately for us – her publisher, a new Penguin Random House imprint, Thesis, does not appear to impose any outdated fact-checking requirements. The only visible standard here is, if it’s shocking, we’ll print it.
      Morning After the Revolution is published in the US by Thesis More

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      Say More review: Jen Psaki on Biden, Trump and how to make your point

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      Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPsaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
      Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Abigail Disney evokes Old Yeller in plea to reject Republicans after Kristi Noem kills dog

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      Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”Noem describes the day she killed Cricket (and an unnamed goat) in No Going Back, a campaign memoir published this week but first reported late last month by the Guardian.Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, met her fate in a gravel pit because Noem deemed her “untrainable” after she disrupted a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens. The goat, which had not been castrated, was deemed too aggressive and smelly and a danger to Noem’s children. By the governor’s own admission, it took two blasts with a shotgun to finish the goat off.Noem has repeatedly defended her story as indicative of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in life as well as politics. Nonetheless, she has reportedly slipped way down Donald Trump’s list of possible vice-presidential picks, should the presumptive Republican nominee avoid prison on any of 88 criminal charges and should he beat Biden in November.Two weeks after the Guardian report, shock and revulsion over Noem’s story continues to ring throughout the US. This week, amid a string of uncomfortable interviews even on usually friendly rightwing networks, also questioning an untrue claim to have met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the governor cut short a promotional tour for her book.In her email in support of the PCCC, Disney said: “Walt Disney also understood story telling. Together, we must make sure all voters see how this sad Kristi Noem episode is part of the larger story of the 2024 election: America could vote into the White House extremists that glorify cruelty and lack basic empathy and compassion.”View image in fullscreenAsking readers to post pictures of beloved pets and the hashtag #UnleashTheVote, Disney also promoted a petition against “Trump and extreme Republicans who lack the character to lead our nation”.Old Yeller, which the Guardian called “one of the best and most poignant boy-and-his dog movies”, was released in 1957. It tells the story of a family in Texas in 1869 that adopts a large yellow dog.Disney said: “In Old Yeller, the family comes to see the lovable stray dog as an indispensable member of the family. The film’s climactic moment is a heartbreaking one, when the father has no choice but to shoot Old Yeller when the dog contracts rabies because of the inevitable threat to their lives – and, out of compassion, to end the suffering the dog would have to endure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Noem shot her family’s 14-month-old puppy after a hunting trip, in her own account, because she was too hard to teach. ‘I hated that dog,’ she wrote, framing the killing of a puppy as an example of strength.“Kristi Noem is not strong. Like Trump, she is cruel and selfish.”Listing positions taken by Trump and supporters like Noem, Disney said: “If Kristi Noem was actually strong, she would stand up to the January 6 insurrectionists instead of celebrating them. Or she would make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes instead of lining up for their campaign donations.“If she had real courage, she might even criticise the supreme court for abolishing abortion rights or making it easier to flood our streets and schools with guns.“True strength is not demonstrated through harshness, brutality, or callous indifference, but through steadfast kindness and compassion. Our pets teach most of us this lesson every day through their loyalty and unconditional love.“Let’s make sure Americans demand leaders who do the same when it comes time to vote.” More

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      ‘Madman in a circular room screaming’: ex-aide’s verdict on Trump in book

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      Donald Trump’s defense secretary called him “a madman in a circular room screaming” and stayed away from the White House, a new book quotes a senior Trump aide as saying regarding the man now facing 88 criminal charges but set to be the Republican presidential nominee for a third successive election.“Anybody with sense – somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Tom Bossert, formerly homeland security adviser to Trump, tells George Stephanopoulos in the ABC News anchor’s new book, The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis.“I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House,” Bossert says. “His view was, ‘That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.’”Stephanopoulos’s book is a survey of how presidents have used the White House Situation Room, “the epicentre of crisis management for presidents for more than six decades”. Co-written with Lisa Dickey, a prolific ghostwriter who has also worked with the first lady, Jill Biden, and the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, the book will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.James Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general, was Trump’s first defense secretary. Rex Tillerson, an oil industry executive, was Trump’s first secretary of state. Both were among so-called “adults in the room” who famously sought to contain Trump.Mattis’s frustrations and ultimate opposition to Trump’s re-election are widely known. Tillerson was reported to have called Trump a “fucking moron”. Trump fired him by tweet.Bossert worked in the Trump White House for 15 months, from the inauguration in 2017 to his resignation in April 2018. He is now an analyst for ABC News. He and other former aides tell Stephanopoulos Trump avoided Situation Room briefings – which his predecessor, Barack Obama, consumed – because, in Bossert’s words, “He didn’t like the idea that he had to go into it. He wanted everybody to come to him.”Bossert also says Trump had Situation Room aides produce “books of chyron prints” – a way to boil down cable news to the messages displayed at the bottom of screens. Stephanopoulos and Hickey call this “surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House”.Though Bossert’s White House tasks including advising the president on cyber security, in August 2017 it was revealed that he gave his personal email address to a British prankster pretending to be Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser.Still, Bossert was a strong advocate of cracking down on leaks and leakers. In March 2017, he made headlines by calling people who leaked government secrets “enemies to our state”, adding: “They need to be caught, punished, and treated as such.”Throughout his presidency, Trump fumed about leaks, both of sensitive information and regarding his chaotic White House.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn summer 2020, as protesters for racial justice came close to White House grounds and Trump was reported to have been hurried to a protective bunker, Trump reportedly called those who leaked the story treasonous and said they should be executed.Trump was said to have become “obsessed” with finding leakers. But Trump has long been known to be a prolific leaker himself.Bossert tells Stephanopoulos: “I caught him doing it. I was walking out of the room, and he picks up the phone before I’m out of earshot and starts talking to a reporter about what just happened. And I turned around and pointed right at him. ‘Who in the hell are you talking to?’”Trump, the authors say, “essentially shrugged, seemingly unbothered”.“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.” More

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      Noem book contains threat against Biden dog: ‘Commander, say hello to Cricket’

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      The White House condemned as “disturbing” and “absurd” comments in which Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota and a potential running mate for Donald Trump, threatened to harm or kill Joe Biden’s dog.“We find her comments from yesterday disturbing,” Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, told a White House briefing. “We find them absurd. This is a country that loves dogs and you have a leader that talks about putting dogs down, killing them.”Noem’s bizarre threat is contained in No Going Back, a campaign book that generated unusual buzz after the Guardian revealed how Noem describes in detail the day she shot dead her dog, Cricket, which she deemed untrainable and dangerous, and an unnamed goat.The revelation sparked a political firestorm, widely held to have incinerated Noem’s chances of being named running mate to Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.But as the book neared publication on Tuesday, it became clear Noem was not done when she closed her chapter on killing Cricket, a 14-month-old female wirehaired pointer, and the unnamed male goat, which Noem says was smelly and aggressive and dangerous to her children.At the end of No Going Back, Noem asks: “What would I do if I was president on the first day in office in 2025?”Remarkably, she writes that “the first thing I’d do is make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds. (‘Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.’)”Noem adds that her own dog, Foster, “would sure be welcome” at the White House.“He comes with me to the [state] capitol all the time and loves everyone,” she writes.Regardless, a governor widely held to have designs on the presidency in 2028 has at least implied, in print, that she would have a predecessor’s dog killed – whether by herself with a shotgun, like Cricket and the goat, or not.Noem has defended her description of killing Cricket and the goat as evidence of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in farm life as well as in politics.Commander, a German shepherd owned by Joe and Jill Biden, was removed from the White House after biting Secret Service agents.On Monday, Jean-Pierre said: “Commander’s living with family members.”The day before, Noem doubled down.Her host on CBS’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan, quoted Noem’s apparent threat to kill Commander and asked: “Are you doing this to try to look tough? Do you still think that you have a shot at being a VP?”Noem said: “Well, number one, Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So, how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it?”Brennan said: “Well, he’s not living at the White House any more.”Noem said: “That’s a question that the president should be held accountable to.”Brennan said: “You’re saying he [Commander] should be shot?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNoem said: “That what’s the president should be accountable to.”Noem tried to move on, to talk about Covid in South Dakota. But she also said she was “so proud” of a book that contained “a lot of truthful stories”.Elsewhere, though, Noem’s publisher, Center Street, said that at Noem’s request it was removing from her book “a passage regarding Kim Jong-un … upon a reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook editions”.In her book, Noem writes: “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”As first reported by the Dakota Scout, no such meeting occurred.Noem told CBS: “What bothers me the most about politicians is when they’re fake.”Brennan said: “But if you have to retract … parts of [the book] …”Noem, whose publisher said it would retract part of her book, said: “I’m not retracting anything.”Brennan said: “OK.”On Saturday, Noem attended a Trump Florida fundraiser featuring a host of vice-presidential contenders.Noem was “somebody I love”, NBC reported Trump as saying, adding: “She’s been with me, and a supporter, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.”But unlike other hopefuls, among them the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Noem was not called to the stage.She reportedly left early. More

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      Kristi Noem defends killing dog: ‘I’m tired of politicians pretending to be what they’re not’

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      The South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful Kristi Noem asked the American public to consider having to “make a choice between your children or a dangerous animal”, as she again defended her killing of a 14-month-old dog.“I would ask everybody in the country to put themselves in that situation,” Noem told CBS’s Face the Nation about her decision to shoot the dog, named Cricket, after the animal ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.“Because that’s what I faced, and I talked about it because what I’m tired of in this country is politicians who pretend to be something that they’re not.”Asked why she did not surrender Cricket to an animal shelter before killing the dog, about 20 years ago, Noem repeated her prior claims that the creature was simply untrainable, had tried to bite her, and might have bitten others.“I had put months and months of training into this dog – the dog had gone to other trainers as well,” Noem said. “When you put someone in a position where … they want to protect their family and protect children and other people from getting attacked, … that’s the choice I made.“And … I didn’t ask anybody to take that responsibility for me.”Noem’s latest justification for fatally shooting Cricket at her farm – an act chronicled in her upcoming memoir No Going Back and first reported by the Guardian – comes as fellow Republicans have all but written off her chances of being chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate in November’s presidential election.A Guardian review of South Dakota state law found Noem may have committed misdemeanors by failing to control Cricket and by killing the animal on her own property. A spokesperson has not responded to inquiries on that point, which many advocates against animal cruelty have also raised.Remarkably, Cricket was only one of two animals Noem says she shot on the same day. On Sunday, the CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Noem to address her admission that, after Cricket, she also shot dead an un-castrated goat, which “smelled” and chased children around Noem’s farm. In No Going Back, the chapter that recounts the episode is entitled “Bad Day to be a Goat”.Brennan noted that Noem’s book also contains the phrase, “Commander, say hello to Cricket” – a reference to Joe Biden’s dog, who was removed from the White House after biting or otherwise assailing Secret Service agents.“How do you justify that?” Brennan said to Noem of her decision to kill the goat. “How was the goat a threat? And I’m asking you this because it seems like you’re celebrating the killing of the animals?”Noem replied that political opponents know the story of the goat’s killing well and have tried to leverage it against her, so she simply wanted “the truth to be out there”.“These animals were attacking,” Noem said. “We live on a farm and a ranch and … tough decisions are made many times, and it is – it is to protect people.”Noem obliquely acknowledged that – ahead of her book’s release Tuesday – she had to retract an anecdote about meeting the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un because the encounter never happened.In her book, Noem claims she was “underestimated” by Kim, but trumpets her experience of “staring down little tyrants”, from her work as a religious pastor ministering to children.The Dakota Scout newspaper reported how Noem’s account of meeting Kim was unlikely, and her spokesperson subsequently told journalists a correction was forthcoming. On Sunday, Noem said “this anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book, and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When the book is released, we’ll do all that we can to see that – that that is reflected,” Noem said.Pressed on the retraction, Noem suggested that she could no longer hear the host.“Hello? I’m sorry, I … ” the former congresswoman said, as Brennan asked why she had not caught the error as she recorded the audio book of the memoir.Yet Noem answered seamlessly when Brennan finished the question, saying: “As soon as it was brought to my attention, I took action to make sure that it was reflected.”Noem insisted: “I’ve met with many, many world leaders – I’ve traveled around the world.”But she also said she was no longer interested in delving into details about such audiences.“I’m not going to talk to you about those personal meetings,” Noem said. “OK? I’m just not going to have that conversation.”Sunday’s interview occurred after Trump called some of those on his VP shortlist to the stage at a private donor retreat in Florida over the weekend, NBC reported. Noem left early and was not included.Edward Helmore contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

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      Donald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend. As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.“The allegations would touch off a years-long case,” the brothers Mullins write.Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.The Democratic party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics. They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties – one Republican, two Democratic – over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed”.The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil” – or apostle.Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley”.The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-Nato Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.The Wolves of K Street is also newsy, disclosing for the first time Manafort’s attempt to have Yanukovych congratulate Joe Biden in summer 2012.“I am thinking of recommending a call from VY to Biden to congratulate Biden on his [re-]nomination” as vice-president to Barack Obama, Manafort emailed Gates, who forwarded the note to Podesta. The brother of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff cum Obama counselor approved.“‘Only downside is [if] biden [sic] presses him personally on politics of criminal prosecutions of his political’ opponents, Podesta responded. ‘I would say worth the risk.’”The Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”One might well reach for Ecclesiastes, son of David: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
      The Wolves of K Street is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More