Kristi Noem rejects ‘liberal plant’ claim on dog-killing tale: ‘Buck stops with me’

Asked if a story about killing a dog and a goat as well as a false claim to have met Kim Jong-un could have been put in her book by an editor acting as “a liberal plant”, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful Kristi Noem seemed to realise such a claim would be too outlandish even for her.

“The buck always stops with me,” Noem told Newsmax. “I take my own full responsibility. I wrote this book.”

No Going Back was published in the US on Tuesday. But for more than a week it has been at the centre of a political firestorm, fueled by a Guardian report of its startling story of how Noem says she shot dead Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer she deemed “untrainable”, and an unnamed goat Noem said menaced her children.

Noem has repeatedly defended the story as an example of how she is willing to do unpleasant things in life and politics.

But the resulting revulsion has spanned the political spectrum and seemingly ended any hope of Noem being named running mate to Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee in November’s election.

Noem’s claim to have met Kim, the North Korean dictator, unravelled amid reporting first by the Dakota Scout. Noem’s publisher, Center Street, said it would remove the passage from digital editions and future print runs.

Amid an awkward media tour in which Noem was challenged on CBS about an apparent threat to kill Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, Noem sought friendlier turf at Newsmax. Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host, duly attempted to give the governor a way to climb off her hurtling train of bad PR.

Saying he had written books and knew “how the process works”, Bolling said: “You don’t write the whole book at once, you write a chapter or two, you send it to the editors and they edit. They read it, they add, they subtract.

“And here’s my question: the editor, was she possibly a plant? A liberal plant? Because I’m not sure either one of these stories, this dog story, the North Korea story, seems like the Kristi Noem I know.”

Noem said: “The buck always stops with me. I take my own full responsibility. I wrote this book and then I take the responsibility for what’s in it.”

Noem called No Going Back a “powerful book” and said people should buy it because it shows what they “can do to get involved”.

But damaging revelations continued. Axios reported that Noem had angled to become president of the National Rifle Association. Worse for Noem, though, was an extensive report in which Politico said she had wanted to include the story of Cricket’s trip to the gravel pit in Not My First Rodeo, a book published in 2022.

Citing two sources, the site said Noem “wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties”.

But advisers including “agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter” reportedly “saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand”, Politico said, and the tale was cut.

Regarding the claim to have met Kim Jong-un, Noem’s spokesperson has said it was the result of a mistaken melding of world leaders’ names.

On the page, Noem calls Kim a “little tyrant”, of a kind she claims to have been used to staring down, having “been a children’s pastor, after all”.

Politico pointed to the real Kim’s physical heft, calling Noem’s fantasy foe “the 300lb despot with the gravity-defying haircut”.