Opinion | Kristi Got Her Gun

Noem certainly shot Cricket on her own, but other passages suggest some pettier motivations. For example, Noem uses the Cricket story to needle President Biden about his own dog, Commander, who was removed from the White House after biting Secret Service agents. “A dog who bites is dangerous and unpredictable (are you listening, Joe Biden?),” Noem writes. She reiterates the point in her final chapter when, in a burst of optimism, Noem lists her Day 1 priorities should she become president in 2025. “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’).”

The latter line doesn’t even really work as a burn (an outgoing president is unlikely to leave his pet behind on the South Lawn), but such simplistic trolling has become an essential part of the faux-tough-guy, vice-signaling discourse of the Trump era. It’s a tone Noem valiantly tries to emulate. “To me, Donald Trump talks like normal people talk, like my friends and neighbors talk — not like people in D.C. talk,” Noem gushes. Even while she lapses into political clichés — “our best days are ahead” and such — she mimics Trump’s attitude, mocking the “bastards” and “haters” and lamenting the Washington “swamp,” all while extolling the former president’s “renegade spirit.”

There are moments in “No Going Back” when Noem sounds like a reasonable leader, even offering some of the generic bipartisanship Washington pretends to long for. She notes that Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and former Senate majority leader, once urged her to seek public office, and that her early negative opinions of Democrats were lessened once she worked with them. “Healthy debate happened, education happened, and respect was forged.” (It’s passive voice, but it’s something.) And the brief passages recalling her loneliness upon moving to Washington as a member of Congress in 2011 are among the more humanizing moments in the memoir. “I felt completely alone, because nobody there really knew me or cared about me,” she writes. “No one there grew up with me or had shared memories.”

But Noem also revels in smallness and contradiction. She describes how she got back at Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, for criticizing her Covid policies. Noem directed “significant portions of our business recruitment ad budget” to erecting billboards in the neighboring state, including near the governor’s mansion where Walz would see them. (“Move to South Dakota for freedom,” they read.) “Just the thought of it still makes me chuckle,” Noem writes, because spending taxpayer funds to trigger the libs is hilarious.

And shortly after arguing that female politicians should support each other (“I find it frustrating — no, disgusting — when insecure women compete with each other rather than help each other”), Noem complains, rather dubiously, that Nikki Haley, who served in the Trump administration as U.N. ambassador but later challenged him in the Republican primary, once threatened her during a phone call. Noem highlights moments when Haley had condemned, and then supported, Trump, concluding that “you never know who she’s going to be tomorrow.”