Stephen Colbert: ‘If you like puppies, you’re not going to like Kristi Noem’
Late-night hosts talk about Kristi Noem’s puppy-killing admission and Donald Trump’s day off from court.
Stephen Colbert
“If you like puppies, you’re not going to like Kristi Noem,” said Stephen Colbert on Monday evening, referring to the governor of South Dakota and a possible running mate for Donald Trump. In her new book, first obtained by the Guardian, Noem admitted to killing her dog. “Now, I know that sounds terrible, but it’s much worse,” said Colbert. “Because this wasn’t some rabid, 90lb hell hound on a meth bender.” It was a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket.
“It is worth pointing out: no one made Noem confess to puppy-snuffing,” the Late Show host said. “She volunteered this information,” even saying: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.”
“So, why? Why did Cricket need to kick it?” Colbert wondered. According to Noem, the puppy was “untrainable”. “Well yeah! She was 14 months old!” Colbert exclaimed.
Noem wrote – “again, in a story no one asked her to tell us”, Colbert noted – that she took Cricket on a pheasant hunt that the puppy ruined, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
“But who among us hasn’t seen a dog running through the fields, not a care in the world, and thought ‘you deserve to die,’” Colbert deadpanned.
Cricket then “made the fatal mistake of continuing to be a normal puppy on the way home”, Colbert noted. Noem wrote that on the way home, Cricket attacked her neighbor’s chickens. “Governor Noem, if you don’t like untrainable animals that wolf down chicken, I have bad news about your party’s nominee,” Colbert quipped.
With the chickens, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”, prompting Noem to write: “I hated that dog.”
“This book is starting to sound less like a political memoir and more like the scrawled manifesto of a guy whose neighbors said, ‘He just kinda kept to himself, you know?’” Colbert said.
Noem said she led Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her, as well as a goat, for smelling bad. “Oh my God, what kind of reverse John Wick farm is she running out there?” Colbert exclaimed.
Seth Meyers
“It’s one thing to kill a dog named Cricket, it’s another to brag about it in a book,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night.
“She thought telling that story would make her look cool,” Meyers mused. “What’s going on? Does she think cats can vote? And even if they could, those lazy sons of bitches aren’t going to wait in line at a high school for three hours.
“It’s horrible enough to kill a dog, but even crazier to brag about it,” he continued. “That’s a level of psycho I didn’t even know existed. Even Buffalo Bill [from The Silence of the Lambs] had the self-awareness to keep his abhorrent behavior indoors. He didn’t walk around town saying, ‘Hey, check out my new outfit. It’s a skin suit!’”
Noem defended her actions on X, formerly Twitter, writing: “tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm” and that she just had to “put down 3 horses a few weeks ago”.
“Way to change the narrative,” Meyers mocked. “‘Yeah, I killed a dog. But in my defense: also, three horses. Sleep with your eyes open, donkey!’”
Meyers also noted another weird Noem moment this year, when she appeared in an ad for a cosmetic dentistry company from Texas. “These stories tell us a lot about Kristi Noem, but they also say a lot about Donald Trump,” he said. “She wants to be his VP, and thought both of those things were positives. That when her name came up, Trump would say ‘nice teeth, kills dogs,