Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, already underneath hearth for killing her household’s 14-month-old canine and boasting about it, on Sunday took goal at one other household’s pet: Commander, President Biden’s bite-prone German shepherd.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ms. Noem, a Republican, advised that Commander, who was banished from the White House final fall after bloodying quite a few Secret Service brokers, must also have been put down.
“Joe Biden’s canine has attacked 24 Secret Service folks,” she advised her interviewer, Margaret Brennan. “So how many individuals is sufficient folks to be attacked and dangerously damage earlier than making a decision on a canine?”
Commander was despatched to an undisclosed location after the Secret Service recorded 24 biting episodes involving him between October 2022 and July 2023, about half of which required medical consideration.
Ms. Noem’s opinion of the correct option to have dealt with him emerged in the course of the publicity ramp-up to the discharge of her memoir, “No Going Back,” which is to be revealed on Tuesday.
The South Dakota governor, who had been extensively seen as a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s working mate, wrote within the e book a couple of feminine wire-haired pointer named Cricket that she had hoped to make use of to hunt pheasant on her ranch. She stated that the canine proved “untrainable,” “harmful to anybody she got here involved with” and “lower than nugatory” as a searching canine — so she shot her in a gravel pit.
“I hated that canine,” Ms. Noem wrote.
She additionally alluded to Commander in elaborating on her resolution to shoot Cricket: “A canine who bites is harmful and unpredictable (are you listening, Joe Biden?) — particularly if you’re working a enterprise the place folks work together along with your canines,” she wrote.
The White House didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In the CBS interview, Ms. Noem sought to defend the killing of Cricket — and a goat she additionally shot the identical day — as “a alternative I remodeled 20 years in the past” to “shield folks.”
But in her e book, she additionally nodded to the concept Cricket could also be in a greater place, or maybe a worse one. Imagining changing into president in 2025 and sending Mr. Biden’s canine to satisfy his maker, Ms. Noem added: “Commander, say good day to Cricket for me.”