Trump’s evil Veep prospect
I have a single-criterion personal litmus test for quickly judging the quality of other human beings. That criterion is how they treat animals. It is not a simplistic criterion. For example, my criterion does not automatically include a sweeping condemnation of carnivores, even though I am vegan, even though that thought is heretical to some other vegans. After all, I began life as a carnivore — and so did most vegans. I know many excellent, animal-friendly carnivores.
But if you have a proprietary attitude toward animals that includes indifference to their suffering, if you’re a pet owner who delights in displays of cruel mastery of your pets, if you think animals have no rights and we are free to dispose of them as we please, you are significantly diminished in my eyes. The final extent of that diminishment is contingent on the degree and quality of your arrogance, of course. Like I said, it’s complicated. It’s personal. If you don’t like it, don’t invite me to your birthday party.
It’s a criterion that has served me well. Donald Trump, for example, is famously an animal hater. He’s the only US president in recent memory who did not have an animal at the White House. Despite the many “touching” anecdotes, Adolf Hitler doesn’t count as an animal lover in my book either. He was frequently cruel in his treatment of his dogs. He coldly tested the efficacy of his bunker supply of cyanide on his “favourite” dog Blondie.
Which brings me to Trump’s short-listed candidate for Vice President, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. She recounts a horrific anecdote in her disgusting, dripping with hubris, soon to be published political memoir. The memoir has the pompously conceited title, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. I believe she meant to call it the “Truth OF,” not the rather cumbersome “Truth ON,” but never mind that.
In Noem’s memoir she tells a horrific story of how she had to “put down” a frisky and zealous “bird dog” named Cricket. On the same day she also similarly dispatched the family goat. If you want to know the details you can Google them. I have no stomach for recounting the idiot’s tale here.
I will say this much. Cricket behaved the way one might expect an animal who was raised as a bird dog to occasionally behave. Her sin was that behaviour did not fall within the narrow guidelines of her insufferably stupid owner.
Rick Wilson, of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, accurately called Noem “deliberately cruel” and “trash.” Ryan Busse, the Democratic candidate for governor of Montana, had this to say: “Anyone who has ever owned a bird dog knows how disgusting, lazy and evil this is. Damn.”
Noem’s Justification was characteristically tone deaf. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” No, if she were a better human being there would be no story to tell. And because Republican stupidity is seldom confined to one thing, if she were a better human being she wouldn’t be on Donald Trump’s shortlist in the first place. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.