Unless you've lived in South Dakota, which Kristi Noem represented in Congress and later served as Governor there's a good chance that if you recognize her name, it's due to the video clip from inside a prison in El Salvador that featured the new Secretary of Homeland Security in front of a cellful of shirtless, tattooed, shaven-headed Venezuelan deportees that she denounces while sporting a $50,000 Rolex watch. An immediate effect of which was to raise anew the question of why Donald Trump had appointed her to a position for which she appeared to have little to no relevant experience.
Some attributed it to her exhibiting a superior level of sycophancy during last year's vice-presidential speculation season. No, thought others, in such times fawners sprout like toadstools after a summer rain; surely there must be something special about this one. And now, a theory involving America's upcoming war with Denmark and Noem's previous career PR highpoint, the story of how she had once shot her fourteen-month-old dog, out of frustration at her inability to train it.
For those who savor the surprises of the Trump years, the recently articulated hostility to Denmark has to rank as top tier. We can imagine that he himself was actually as amazed as the next American to learn that humongous Greenland is actually an autonomous territory of otherwise tiny Denmark. And, real estate being the President's primary business interest, he has decided that the US has greater need for the world's largest island than Denmark does. Heads that take Trump seriously as well as those that don't were set spinning alike by this newly enunciated national security priority. But as the now ubiquitous, but previously unfamiliar, north pole-centered mops clearly show across the ever-shrinking Arctic ice pack from the US lies Russia!
The thing is, though, Trump doesn't actually seem all that concerned about Russia as a security threat. During his February 28 Oval Office encounter with Volodymyr Zelensky, he went so far as to tell the Ukrainian President that Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He's even claimed that it was Ukraine that started the war with Russia. And the fact is that the secret potential war plans on which the Pentagon intended to brief Elon Musk before public outcry put the kibosh on the idea concerned China, not Russia. Which should make it pretty clear which nation is actually being ginned up as the national security threat.
Now, the fact is that Trump has never particularly been known for an expansive interest in or knowledge of geography that doesn't hold some kind of business angle for him. Could it be, then, that he thinks Greenland would actually provide some kind of buffer against China? This all, of course, is speculative, but what we do know is that so far as the prospect of the U.S. taking possession of Greenland, Trump says he thinks there's a good possibility that we could do it without military force, which should be quite reassuring to us all, although he cautioned that he won't take anything off the table.
Hey, that's what the man said, so let's imagine what happens when the absurd gets serious. Some may recall that when France proved a tough sell on the endless War on Terror, announcing its intent to veto any United Nations resolution calling for invasion of Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives responded by altering the menus of three congressional cafeterias, renaming French fries as freedom fries. (None will recall, however, when the U.S. entry into the First World War against Germany turned frankfurters into hot dogs.) So, if Denmark continues to balk at the Presidential whim, we can no doubt look forward to ordering Cheese Americans to go with our coffee in the future.
But the ire directed at the willful little Scandinavian nation will not likely stop at the pastry shop. Which is what brings us back to the question of what Kristi Noem's doing here. Well, the story she told about her dead dog was that it was untrainable, dangerous to anyone she came in contact with, less than worthless as a hunting dog. I hated that dog, Noem said. The final straw came when she dropped in on some neighbors, let the dog escape her control, and it proceeded to kill the neighbor's chickens. After paying for the chickens, she took the dog to a gravel pit and shot it. But that's not all. She then realized that another unpleasant job needed to be done, and went back and got a goat her family had that was nasty and mean, prone to chasing and knocking down her kids. Oh, and it smelled bad, disgusting, musky, rancid. So she shot the goat too. Didn't get the job done on her first shot though. Had to go back to the truck for a another shell to finish it off.
None of this story, you must understand, required any sort of hard-nosed investigative journalism to uncover. It comes from a book that Noem herself wrote: "No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward", an autobiography, her second, written when she was preening for the vice-presidential nod. She recounted the bizarre anecdote, she says, as an example of her willingness to do difficult, messy and ugly things when they just had to be done. As we know, she didn't ultimately land the nomination. Some suspect it was because it took her two shots to get the goat. Who knows, but Trump did ultimately decide he wanted her around.
Should the President's Greenland/Denmark obsession continue to meander on, the campaign against Danish aggression surely won't stop at the breakfast counter. And it's when we start to envision additional targets that the potential Kristi Noem role in all this starts to take shape. The most obvious display of this alien roadblock to American national security? It's the dogs, of course, Great Danes being pretty much the Greenland of dog breeds. The threat that canines of that size in the service of an enemy power would pose to America's most vulnerable citizens, our children, is too obvious to require discussion.
Who's better qualified to conduct a national anti-Great Dane campaign than Noem? Imagine, if you will, her standing there in front of a pound filled with chained, baying, deported Great Danes, shotgun in hand, and Rolex on wrist. Could there be a more powerful image of the nation's determination in a life and death struggle with Denmark, and if need be against Europe itself? And should any Great Dane think to resist arrest, well, we know that Noem is one government bureaucrat whose bark is not worse than her bite.
Far fetched, you say? Scoff you may, but remember what else you used to consider far-fetched until not so long ago. I know that if I had a Great Dane, I'd be thinking about life-style alternatives for the dog perhaps even getting a saddle and trying to pass it off as a Icelandic pony. And I'd get real nervous if I heard that Noem was in town.
As of late, she's been called ICE Barbie for her appearance at deportation raids. The future? Kristi Noem: Bane of Great Danes? As we are well aware, crazier things have already happened.
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