Kristi Noem broke what had been a month-long silence on X on Wednesday May 13, returning to the platform to respond to a dig from Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith and immediately reminding the entire internet exactly why she had gone quiet in the first place.
Smith had posted a photo of herself cuddling a puppy with a simple, devastating caption: “Don’t worry buddy, Kristi Noem isn’t around anymore.”
The reference was unmistakable to anyone following US politics over the past two years, pointing directly to Noem’s widely condemned admission in her 2024 memoir No Going Back that she took her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer puppy Cricket to a gravel pit and shot it dead because it was, in her framing, untrainable and had been killing her neighbour’s chickens.
Noem, now serving as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas after being removed as Secretary of Homeland Security, responded with what she clearly intended as a sharp comeback, writing “Oh but I am…And I love puppies,” followed by a heart emoji.
The internet disagreed with her assessment. The response flooded in almost immediately, with hundreds of users pointing out that claiming to love puppies while having personally shot a puppy dead in a gravel pit was not the clapback Noem appeared to think it was.
Representative comments included “Yeah, you just love them to death, don’t you?” and “You love them to death, right Kristi?” with the phrase “love them to death” becoming a recurring motif across the replies as users drew out the unintentional implication.
The exchange was Noem’s first substantial return to X following an extended break from the platform that had come after a separate scandal involving her husband, Bryon Noem, who had been reported to have sent money to an online fetish model and praised her appearance in terms that drew considerable unwanted attention to the Noem household.
DHS is additionally under investigation over Noem’s tenure at the department, with reports emerging that she oversaw the purchase of approximately $1 billion worth of vacant warehouses to serve as ICE detention facilities, allegedly paying an average of 12% above market rate and wasting around $107 million in the process.
The Cricket incident had already made Noem one of the most mocked figures in US politics since the memoir dropped in 2024, with her admission drawing criticism not just from Democrats but from Republican senators including Thom Tillis who demanded her resignation at the time.
Smith’s post was seen as an efficient reminder to all of that history in a single image and nine words, and Noem’s decision to respond by insisting on her love of puppies was widely read as a political miscalculation that served only to revive a story that had partially faded from the headlines.
