JOHN "TULSI" FETTERMAN GOES CONSPIRACY-ADJACENT, WHICH IS INEVITABLE WHEN YOU EMBRACE GOP MESSAGING

What happened to John Fetterman? He's not the only Democrat who continues to be a strong supporter of Israel, although his attacks on the protesters have been unusually relentless, and he's embraced the cockamamie idea of making Mitt Romney the president of Harvard. Fetterman isn't the only Democrat who frets about the border, though he's probably the only one who's said that Democrats are partly to blame for the fact that a tough immigration bill failed to pass this year. (Everyone else knows that Republicans didn't want it to pass because they want to keep running on border fears.)

Fetterman hasn't rejected the Democratic Party -- yet -- but he uses the same language about progressivism that ex-Democrats inevitably use in reference to the party:

Sen. John Fetterman once boasted about being a progressive. Now he doesn’t recognize them anymore.

“It’s not so much that I left the title, the title left me,” said Fetterman, 54, who ... once vowed that “Progressive values” were the heart of his political identity.

Although Fetterman now says, "I really just feel much more comfortable just being a Democrat," it seems only a matter of time before we get a book like this from Fetterman:

Are plutocrats grooming Fetterman to replace the retiring Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as the roadblocks to liberal change, in the event that President Biden is reelected and Democrats hold the Senate with 50 senators? (You might argue that Fetterman is still a Bernie Sanders-style progressive -- Fetterman endorsed Sanders during the 2016 primaries -- but remember that Sinema used to be a member of the Green Party. People change, especially when fat checks are waved at them.)

Or maybe Fetterman is just trying to be an independent and eclectic thinker, a guy who calls 'em as he sees 'em. That's possible -- but if so, it puts him in the company of some shady characters.

Here's Fetterman giving a thumbs-up to Ron DeSantis:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zZLYf8t5lI

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 2, 2024

Fetterman's follow-up tweet got the response it deserved:

SHINY MACHINE SCARY lmao

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@ygalanter.bsky.social) May 3, 2024 at 8:56 PM

That was in addition to the community note:

btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat pic.twitter.com/4GZIt4SnNN

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 3, 2024

When Governor DeSantis signed this bill, he didn't just denounce lab-grown meat:

In a nationwide first, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has outlawed the sale and distribution of lab-grown meat in his state, claiming a ban will prevent “the global elite” from “forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.”

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a statement following the legislation’s signing Wednesday.

Right-wingers are obsessed with the idea that "the global elite" wants to force ordinary citizens to eat insects. This belief is connected to the right-wing idea that the World Economic Forum is all-powerful. And yes, it's true that the WEF has promoted the idea of insect-eating -- here's a 2018 post titled "Good Grub: Why We Might Be Eating Insects Soon," and here are a few follow-ups:

But the WEF can't actually force anyone to eat insects. Some right-wingers know this, but they also know that the rank-and-file Republican voters love to think of themselves as the victims of massive conspiracies concocted by all-powerful supervillains. They believe they'll someday have to eat bugs at gunpoint -- unless they resist.

So far, resistance mostly comes in meme form:

But now the conspiracy theory has been embraced by the governor of the third most populous state in the Union.

If you repeatedly endorse Republican messaging, inevitably you'll be endorsing the crackpottery of crazy conspiratorialists. But maybe John Fetterman is okay with that now.

WILL RUBIO BE TRUMP'S SUBMISSIVE?

As we all know, Donald Trump really thinks he's the Donald Trump of The Apprentice, the brilliant decision-maker who holds the fate of many supplicants in the palm of his undersized hand. He's entertaining himself this weekend with an Apprentice-style cattle call for potential running mates:

At least six contenders for the former president's running mate – Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio; Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum – will attend a Republican donor retreat Friday and Saturday in Palm Beach, Florida, in what looks like a series of auditions.

What, no Tulsi Gabbard? No Byron Donalds? No Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or should we tune in this weekend for surprise special guests? (You can't actually tune in -- but if Trump understood the technology better, he would have arranged to have this livestreamed as a pay-per-view special on Truth Social. The rubes would definitely pay to watch that! And The New York Times would be delighted....)

A Bloomberg story says that, "according to people familiar with the deliberations as recently as this week," the real shortlist consists of the four men attending: Vance, Burgum, Scott, and Rubio. But wait -- wouldn't there be a constitutional problem if Trump ran with Rubio?

A couple of days ago, The Bulwark's Marc Caputo addressed this. His conclusion: If Trump decides to pick Rubio, he'd make Rubio solve the problem.

The Twelfth Amendment says that if the president and vice president inhabit the same state when the states’ electors cast their ballots (that’s on December 17 this year), the ticket could lose its Electoral College votes from that state (Florida has 30, 11 percent of the total needed to win the White House)....

“Marco has this residency problem,” is how Trump describes it to others.

(It's constitutional to run a ticket with two candidates from the same state. It's not constitutional for electors from that state to vote for both people on the ticket, even if that ticket wins the state.)

TRUMP IS STRONGLY CONSIDERING Rubio because he’s keenly aware Rubio is fluent in Spanish, is the only Hispanic on his shortlist, and is attractive to the establishment donors his cash-hungry campaign needs.

I think Trump is also considering Rubio because he seems kinda submissive.

But wait -- isn't there a simple solution to the residency problem? Doesn't Trump have residences in multiple states?

Yes, but Trump doesn't think it's up to the alpha male in this relationship to solve the problem, according to Caputo:

Trump could change his residence back to New York (where he’s staying in Trump Tower during his trial) or to New Jersey (where he frequently summers at his golf course in Bedminster). But he doesn’t want to leave Florida. The state has no income tax and is so thoroughly Republican-controlled that he doesn’t have to worry about any local politicians causing trouble for him. Plus: Why should Trump move to accommodate his vice presidential pick? That’s a cuck move, for sure.

Moving residences is for betas and running mates.

So if Caputo is right, Rubio -- a sitting senator from Florida -- might declare himself a resident of another state. Caputo says that this could "force the senator’s resignation," but that wouldn't be legally necessary -- the Constitution says only that a senator, "when elected," must "be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen," and Florida law has no additional residency requirement. So Rubio could buy a house in (for example) Texas, declare it his legal residency, and remain a senator from Florida while running for VP. Or, since the Twelfth Amendment says doesn't say how long one of the candidates electors pick would need to have been a resident of another state, Rubio could run with Trump and presumably change his residency to another state only if the Trump-Rubio ticket wins.

There's a precedent for this: the 2000 Republican ticket. Here's a story from July of that year:

Dick Cheney ... traveled to Wyoming today to change his voter registration from Texas, a move that could allow him to overcome a provision in the Constitution that would have prevented him from becoming Bush’s running mate....

Until today, Cheney was a registered voter in Dallas County, Texas and lived in Dallas. Governor Bush lives in Austin.

Bush picked Cheney and that was the last we ever heard of this.

Caputo thinks there would be lawsuits if Trump picked Rubio. He's probably right, but I assume that the Republican-dominated federal courts would want to do nothing to harm the GOP's chances of regaining the presidency (though I suspect that if Democrats try this sometime in the future, the Supreme Court will suddenly discover a previously unnoticed "history and tradition" that makes the Democratic ticket unconstitutional).

Would Trump really want to put himself through all this? Probably not. Maybe he invited Rubio to impress Rubio's donors. Or maybe he just wants to put someone who was perceived as a serious rival eight years ago on a stage and watch him grovel.

UNLEASH JOE BIDEN

I don't know if you've noticed this, but Donald Trump is giving a lot of interviews these days. You probably know about the lengthy Time interview, but yesterday, while his court case was in recess, Trump gave interviews to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as well as to local Fox affiliates in Milwaukee and Detroit.

You can't blame Trump's campaign for pursuing this strategy. It seems clear that President Biden's team doesn't want him to talk to the media very much. Representatives of elite news outlets have comnplained that Biden won't give them interviews, particularly The New York Times, which has launched a vendetta against Biden because of this refusal. Understandably, Trump wants to prove that he's not afraid to talk to the press.

The tone of Trump's interviews reminds me of the name of a popular subreddit at Reddit: Confidently Incorrect. For instance, in Trump's Detroit interview, he offers a conspiratorial interpretation of a fake Venezuela crime statistic:

The former President said current President Joe Biden is allowing criminals into the country, particularly from Venezuela.

"One stat before we go. Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA. And Biden let them do it. It's a disgrace," Trump said....

We promised to check on those claims – and WUFT, a public TV station in central Florida, checked Trump's similar claims earlier in April, saying they were down 67%. WUFT partnered with Politifact to check on his claims and found them to be false.

Politifact notes that while Venezuela has seen a recent drop in crime, it's much smaller than Trump claims. Venezuela also continues to have a higher crime rate than other countries in the region. (Remember Steve M.'s Law: Not everything Trump says is a lie, but any Trump utterance that includes a number is a lie.) But Trump will just keep saying this. He sounds sure of himself, and most of the time low-information voters will never learn about the fact check.

I know what you're thinking: Everything Trump says is self-evidently awful, ridiculous, or both. To you, I'm sure it is. It is to me, too. But he's not doing this to appeal to us. He's doing this to appeal to swing voters. And if they don't know much about the subjects he's talking about -- if, in other words, they know about as much as he does -- all they'll see is a confident guy who can talk at length about the issues, making the case that he'd be a great president and that Joe Biden is a lousy one. His sense of certainty might be enough to persuade them. (Remember what Bill Clinton said after he left office: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.")

Now, here's an AP headline about President Biden:

Biden Keeps Quiet as Gaza Protesters and Police Clash on College Campuses

Biden spoke on the subject today, and the headline has changed ("Biden Says ‘Order Must Prevail’ During Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza"). But we're still told that Biden didn't address the issue for quite a while:

[Biden's] remarks, occurring shortly before he left the White House for a trip to North Carolina, came after days of silence about the protests....

Biden’s last previous public comment on the protests came more than a week ago....

And Trump has picked up on this. Here's what he said to Jason Calvi of Fox's Milwaukee affiliate about the possibility of Gaza protests at the parties' conventions this summer:

Calvi: You'll be here in Milwaukee. Are you worried about protests? We've seen these protests at campuses across the country. Are you worried that they're going to target Republicans, as well, in Milwaukee?

Trump: No, I don't see it. I do see a problem in Chicago for the Democrats, because they've handled things very poorly in so many different ways, and they have a person that doesn't even speak to the public. I don't know, has he came out and spoken yet? I don't think he's spoken about what's going on with the colleges and universities. So, I think you're going to have a little bit of a problem in Chicago. Maybe a big problem. I think here is going to be good.

I don't agree with everything Biden said today about the Gaza protests, but I think he should be doing this every day: addressing the most important stories in the country, speaking out, making news. The public needs to see him engaging with what's happening in the country and the world every day.

But his handlers don't want that. They're afraid of gaffes. Well, a few weeks ago Biden incorrectly said that his uncle, a World War II pilot, might have been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea. But that story is mostly forgotten already. It's been overtaken by events.

Even the much more alarming things Trump has said recently -- like his assertion in the Time interview that he won't intervene if anti-abortion states monitor pregnancies or jail those who seek abortions -- aren't dominating the news conversation, because other stories are seen as more important. So Trump just carries on talking. Biden should talk a lot more too.

TRUMP ON ABORTION (AND COVID): THE STRONGMAN PASSES THE BUCK

Is Donald Trump a strong leader? A majority of Americans believe he is. In a March survey from Gallup, 57% of respondents said that Trump "is a strong and decisive leader." That number included 58% of independents and even 18% of Democrats. In an Economist/YouGov survey conducted in January, 55% of respondents said that Trump is a "very strong" or "somewhat strong" leader, including 53% of independents and 23% of Democrats.

Belief in Trump's strength as a leader is so pervasive that it survived even the extraordinary amount of buck-passing he did during the biggest crisis of his final year in office, the COVID pandemic. Trump was a blame-shifter right from the start, telling a reporter who asked him about the lack of available tests, "I don't take responsibility at all." When governors sought medical supplies from the federal government, Trump told them, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.” He blamed China. He blamed past presidents, especially Barack Obama.

Trump, the strong leader, likes to shift blame whenever he believes that no good outcome is possible for him. He's blame-shifting on abortion, which he once supported openly and now opposes only because his voter base does. He deeply resents any implication that he might bear some responsibility for the future of abortion rights in America, even as he takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who got rid of Roe v. Wade. If you don't like what's about to happen, don't come whining to him! It's not his fault -- and it won't be his fault in a second term, as he insisted to Time magazine's Eric Cortellessa in a newly published interview. Over and over again he said it would be a state matter:

You came out this week and said that abortion should be left to the states and you said you won't sign a federal ban. So just to be clear: Will you veto any bill that imposes any federal restrictions on abortions?

Trump: You don’t need a federal ban. We just got out of the federal. You know, if you go back on Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade was all about—it wasn't about abortion so much as bringing it back to the states. So the states would negotiate deals. Florida is going to be different from Georgia and Georgia is going to be different from other places....

People want to know whether you would veto a bill, if it came to your desk, that would impose any federal restrictions. This is really important to a lot of voters.

Trump: But you have to remember this: There will never be that chance because it won't happen. You're never going to have 60 [Republican] votes [in the Senate]. You're not going to have it for many, many years, whether it be Democrat or Republican. Right now, it’s essentially 50-50. I think we have a chance to pick up a couple, but a couple means we're at 51 or 52. We have a long way to go. So it's not gonna happen, because you won't have that. Okay. But with all of that being said, it's all about the states, it's about state rights. States’ rights. States are going to make their own determination.

So just to be clear, then: You won't commit to vetoing the bill if there's federal restrictions—federal abortion restrictions?

Trump : I won't have to commit to it because it’ll never—number one, it’ll never happen. Number two, it’s about states’ rights. You don't want to go back into the federal government. This was all about getting out of the federal government. And this was done, Eric, because of—this was done, this issue, has been simplified greatly over the last one week. This is about and was originally about getting out of the federal government. The last thing you want to do is go back into the federal government. And the states are just working their way through it....

... Your allies in the Republican Study Committee, which makes up about 80% of the GOP caucus, have included the Life of Conception act in their 2025 budget proposal. The measure would grant full legal rights to embryos. Is that your position as well?

Trump: Say it again. What?

The Life at Conception Act would grant full legal rights to embryos, included in their 2025 budget proposal. Is that your position?

Trump: I'm leaving everything up to the states. The states are going to be different. Some will say yes. Some will say no. Texas is different than Ohio.

Would you veto that bill?

Trump: I don't have to do anything about vetoes, because we now have it back in the states.

Donald Trump is viscerally pro-choice, no matter what he tells the rubes now, because having abortion available as a backup during his days as a self-promoting cocksman was a matter of self-preservation. (Self-preservation is the closest thing Trump has to a core value.) He worries that abortion might defeat him in 2024 the way many people believe COVID defeated him in 2020. So he's insisting that the potential bad outcomes are other people's fault.

The exchange that's causing him the most trouble today is this one:

Let’s say there’s a 15-week ban.... Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?

Trump: I think they might do that. Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states....

States will decide if they're comfortable or not—

Trump: Yeah the states—

Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban. But are you comfortable with it?

Trump: The states are going to say. It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It's totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.

As in the case of COVID, Trump might succeed in persuading people that bad outcomes aren't his fault, but because he's the most narcissistic person who's ever lived, he can't even bring himself to express concern about bad outcomes.* Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID? Women are monitored by the state so they can't get abortions, or are thrown in jail if they try to obtain one? Trump can't make himself say he feels anyone's pain, because the only pain he can feel is the pain of being blamed for something that he's told us repeatedly is someone else's fault.

That's leadership, Trump style!


* Much less say that, as the president of the United States, he'd work to eliminate or minimize those bad outcomes.

THE GAZA PROTESTS MIGHT NEUTRALIZE JANUARY 6 AS A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

This happened overnight at Columbia University:

Dozens of protesters seized Hamilton Hall in the early hours of Tuesday morning, moving metal gates to barricade the doors, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.

Protestors carrying barricades entered Hamilton through the leftmost door of the building at approximately 12:30 a.m. Shortly after, a protester broke the window of the rightmost door of Hamilton as dozens more formed a human barricade directly outside the Hamilton doors. Within minutes, protesters sealed Hamilton while hundreds more flooded in front of the building.

News consumers will see broken windows a lot in the next day or two -- and possibly for much longer than that:

#NOW Glass doors into Hamilton Hall inside Columbia were smashed up, protesters stormed in occupying the building, barricading doors with metal gates, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.pic.twitter.com/dXxErABRWL

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) April 30, 2024

Does this remind you of anything?



The story of January 6 is contested. Republicans want you to see it the way Tucker Carlson did:



Only Republican zealots think January 6 was peaceful. But it will be harder to make the case that January 6 was intolerably violent when pro-Gaza demonstrators are doing things we associate with January 6 insurrectionists.

HAMILTON HALL HAS BEEN OCCUPIED @Columbia pic.twitter.com/xPWFdeEOX9

— Jessica Schwalb (@jessicaschwalb7) April 30, 2024

Republicans have been doing this kind of compare-and-contrast for years, of course. They've argued that the protests held in the wake of George Floyd's murder were riots led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists. In their own media, they cherry-pick the worst visuals, and contrast them with the most placid clips of January 6.

Obviously, that's persuasive to Republican voters and less persuasive to everyone else. But bad footage of the Floyd protests exists, and it undoubtedly has some impact on how middle-of-the-road voters see that time period, and January 6 in particular.



An argument that isn't made often enough is this: On some level it doesn't matter whether other protests were more violent than January 6, because January 6 was about overturning the results of a democratic election. As bad as the violence may have become in the worst of the George Floyd protests, those protesters seized temporary control of the streets -- they didn't attempt to seize ongoing control of the government in defiance of the will of voters. It may be bad to smash store windows or overturn police cars, but elections are fundamental to our system of government. The correct way to measure the seriousness of what happened is not the degree of violence, but the danger inherent in the potential outcome.

But we rarely hear that, so the protests are judged based on how unruly they look. And the campus protests are looking worse.

RIGHT-WING MEN HATE THE GAZA PROTESTS BECAUSE OF THEIR FRUSTRATED LIBIDOS

Kat Abughazaleh catches Jesse Watters of Fox News telling fellow panelists on The Five that the Gaza protests on campus are happening because female students don't have boyfriends:

JESSE WATTERS: Females -- I think I can speak for the women at the table -- are generally nurturing people. And when their professors are giving them better grades for their social activism, they're trying to appeal to their teachers, and they've been told they're oppressed as women, and they identify with the Palestinians, and they're trying to hug them and nurture them.

Because they're single, they're not nurturing their boyfriends. Their boyfriends have been described as toxic. So they're trying to nurture other people.

This is the language of the manosphere (demeaningly referring to women as "females," accusing them of misandry), with a slightly varied message (young women aren't having massive amounts of indiscriminate sex with tall, handsome "Chads," they're channeling that energy into activism instead). This is directed not at sexually frustrated young men, like most manosphere media content, but rather at the older men who are a large part of Fox's audience. Presumably some of these men are also sexually frustrated, but even the ones who aren't are likely to envy the protesters' youth and presumed sexual vigor -- and they're likely to be the kind of men who expect every woman to be flirty and smiley, especially toward men like themselves, rather than serious about a cause.

If you think this is just one isolated sexist riff, I refer you to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway's weekend appearance on Bill Maher's show, which was lovingly written up in the New York Post:

NYU professor Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex.

“We need to enjoy sex,” Galloway offered to some initial confusion during an appearance on “Real Time” with Bill Maher Friday.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].”

Galloway loves this argument. Here he is on CNN:

One reason for the rampant campus Israel protests, says NYU Professor Scott Galloway, is that "Protesting is the new sex....You get a dopa hit from gathering together in fighting off a perceived enemy [and] I think they're on the hunt for what I'd call a fake mortal enemy."

How sexually obsessed is Professor Galloway? Very sexaully obsessed:

If you think that sounds bad, trust me, the reality is worse:

Scott Galloway (⁦@profgalloway⁩) has a new show on Bloomberg’s ⁦@Quicktake⁩ streaming service and … this deleted video gives some … insight into what to expect? pic.twitter.com/IsUyFwend1

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) July 2, 2021

This professor's obsession with young people's sex lives reminds me of T Bone Burnett's 1983 spoken-word song "The Sixties," particularly the second verse, about a frustrated man:

... after a while, he started hearing about free love
And he felt left out
And he tortured his imagination dreaming of pot parties
With those suntanned girls in halter tops with their cutoffs slit up to their belt loops
Then he saw a picture in Playboy of Ursula Andress on the arm of some hippie and that did it
He began his rebellion late
And now he's got a designer camper
And one time he even got to sleep in it with one of those girls in the cutoffs
But it made me feel awful
'Cause he had to pay her fifty dollars
And it was twenty for anybody else

I'll close with this guy, a troll who was posting briefly at Bluesky until he was banned:

In the master narrative of the manosphere, college-age women have indiscriminate sex with alpha males until time catches up with them at the advanced age of 30, or even 25, at which point they're shriveled-up old crones no man would be interested in -- childless, unattached, alone with their cats, full of antidepressants, and miserable. That's the narrative this troll seems to be invoking. Watters and Galloway rewrite the narraative, but this is it in its pure form. None of these guys seem capable of imagining that anyone could engage in protest because they believe in the cause.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN'T EVEN COVER KRISTI NOEM'S DOG MURDER CORRECTLY

On Friday, The Guardian's Martin Pengelly reported that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem -- a top contender for the job of Donald Trump's running mate -- confesses to murdering a dog and a goat in her forthcoming memoir, No Turning Back. Noem says she shot the 14-month-old dog to death after it attacked a neighbor's chickens, and also killed a goat owned by her family that was, in her telling "nasty and mean" as well as foul-smelling.

According to the media, reaction to the story was swift -- and bipartisan. Politico's headline is "Dems, GOP Bash Kristi Noem for Shooting Her Dog." The headline at Salon is "'Cruel and Insane': Republicans Condemn Kristi Noem's Dog-Killing Revelation." The Daily Beast headline is "Republicans Pile On as Kristi Noem Cripples Her Shot at Being Trump’s VP."

Obviously, this story isn't about a major issue facing the country. But we're being told that the Republican response has bee similar to the Democratic response when, in fact, most of Noem's GOP critics are actually anti-Trump Republicans (or former Republicans), as the Daily Beast story makes clear:

Alyssa Farrah Griffith, the Trump administration’s former director of strategic communications, wrote that she was “horrified” by the story, in a post on X. “A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained. A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them.”

... Sarah Matthews, a former Trump aide posted on X, saying she was shocked that Noem had told on herself in such an outrageous way.

Griffith and Matthews broke with Trump years ago, cooperated with the House January 6 committee, and continue to be Trump critics.

Meghan McCain also jumped on the South Dakota governor’s atrocious anecdote. “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc.—but not from killing a dog,” McCain wrote.

McCain has been a Trump critic since Trump verbally attacked her father in 2015.

Salon's story surfaces the same names, as well as this one:

Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson kept it simple, tweeting “Good morning to all you who didn’t shoot your puppy in the face.”

The only Noem critic named in these stories who isn't a professional anti-Trumper is Laura Loomer:

Even top Trump ally Laura Loomer was disgusted by this level of cruelty, tweeting, "She can't be VP now."

(People close to Trump have urged him to keep his distance from Loomer, so she's undoubtedly envious of Noem's status as a potential VP candidate.)

The only Republican in relatively good standing who addressed this did so obliquely, as Politico reports:

Florida governor and former Trump rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ron DeSantis pitched in with a call to action — and a dig at the southern border crisis.

“Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone — even our canine friends,” DeSantis tweeted. “Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.”

Contrast this with the responses by Democrats:

“Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wrote on X.... Alongside it was a picture of Walz feeding his dog a treat.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also responded with pictures of their beloved pets....

“ACT NOW!” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wrote on X alongside an infomercial-style video in memoriam for Cricket. ”For just $.10 a day you can help us save a puppy from Kristi Noem.”

And, as Salon notes, Noem had aat least one high-profile defender on the right:

“The Daily Wire” commentator Michael Knowles took to Twitter to share his unpopular opinion.

“This story makes me like and respect her more,” the CPAC speaker said.

This is a trivial story, but once again the press is giving the GOP credit for beliefs its core membership doesn't really share.

*****

So why did Noem put the animal-murder stories in her book? New York magazine's Margaret Hartmann has theories:

Theory No. 1: Kristi Noem is an incredibly bad politician.

This is actually the reason Noem provides in the book. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she writes....

Theory No. 2: Kristi Noem is trying to impress Trump, and he hates dogs.

... Julie Alderman Boudreau, presidential-research director for American Bridge 21st Century, offered this explanation:

Theory No. 3: Kristi Noem wants off Trump’s VP shortlist.

Is Noem’s tale an intentional act of self-sabotage? That’s the theory put forth by Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin:

Theory No. 2 has some merit -- if Trump likes an inner-circle aspirant, he's fond of saying that the person is "a killer" -- but beyond that, I think the answer is simple. Noem was trying to send a favorite Republican message: I'm from a rural red state, and I've done things no soy-eating big-city liberal would ever do. This works if you're a Republican woman. Remember how we were told in 2008 that Sarah Palin knew how to field-dress a moose?

But a dog is not a moose. People love dogs. Noem miscalculated.

I expected Noem to say that she wishes the libs would get as upset about killing "the babies" as they do about killing dogs. But she knows Trump wants to downplay his party's abortion absolutism, at least until November, so she can't even play that card. She's cooked.