"You can't see the fear in her [Kristi Noem's] face when she does interviews because of all the botox and plastic surgery" - my wife.
One of the fascinating things about Kristi Noem's political collapse is how she's clearly not good at politics.
She showed incredibly poor judgement in bragging about shooting a dog and lying about meeting Kim Jong-Un, she showed incredibly poor judgement continuing to put herself out there on her press tour rather than cancelling interviews and laying low until the news cycle moves onto something new, and she is absolutely terrible at changing the subject gracefully when reporters ask her tough questions: a skill that most politicians master early on.
This makes me wonder: how the hell did she become a governor despite being so bad at this? And the answer is obvious: it's South Dakota. The small mostly-empty rural states are like the minor leagues of politics. All you have to do is wear a cowboy hat, get some deep-pocketed donors, and take pictures of yourself holding a rifle, and you have a good shot at winning. Campaigning in such a state is like riding a bicycle with training wheels on.
It's hilarious that Kristi Noem's people think they can make the dog-killing story go away by pointing out that it happened 20 years ago. There are two obvious problems with this approach:
1: It says something extremely disturbing about her personality, even if it did happen 20 years ago.
2: She may have callously executed her dog 20 years ago, but she bragged about it just this year. Normally, when you use the "it happened a long time ago" line, you're supposed to follow it up with "and I've changed since then", not "and I'm so proud of what I did".
This whole Cricket debacle has been Kristi Noem's attempt to emulate Trump's political method:
Step 1: Say something scandalous.
Step 2: Double down (remember when she said "Commander, meet Cricket"?
Step 3: Appear "strong" in the eyes of the MAGA crowd by refusing to back down.
The problem is that this only works for Trump, because he is a cult leader. Unless you already have a cult, you can't do that kind of cult-leader stuff and get away with it.