Donald Trump Brushes Off Kristi Noem’s Puppy-Slaying Saga, Insists “She’s Terrific”

Donald Trump has finally weighed in on Kristi Noem’s tale of dog (and goat) slaying, and his take on the situation? That she’s a wonderful woman who’s caught a tough break, and a ghostwriter is probably to blame for the whole thing.

Speaking to radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, Trump addressed the immense backlash Noem has received: “Sometimes you do books and you have some guy writing a book, and you maybe don’t read it as carefully. You know, you have ghost writers too. They help you. And they, in this case, didn’t help too much. Now, she’s terrific. Look, she’s been a supporter of mine from day one. She did a great job as governor…I think she’s terrific. Couple of rough stories, no question about it, and when explained, the dog story—you know, people hear that and people from different parts of the country probably feel a little bit differently, but that’s a tough story. But she’s a terrific person. She had a bad week. We all have bad weeks.”

Noem, for the one person who might have missed it, revealed in her new book, No Going Back, that she shot and killed her family’s 14-month-old dog, as well as a goat. While the South Dakota governor has claimed to be a victim of the “fake news,” it was, in fact, her choice to not only include the story in the book, but also go into great, grisly detail about it. And despite her insistence that people will feel better about the anecdote if they actually read the book, she reportedly comes off even worse in full context. Indeed, people who have read it to decide for themselves have also been treated to the section in which Noem bizarrely suggests she’d like to kill Joe Biden’s dog.

One thing readers of No Going Back probably won’t get to see is the completely made-up story about Noem meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un when she was a congresswoman. That tale has been removed, with Noem claiming that she asked for it to be taken out the second she “became aware” of it. Despite this, she has refused to admit the meeting never happened.