Donald Trump has an attack dog and her name is Kristi Noem. As the snowy streets of Minnesota erupted this January, Noem has become the face of Trump’s spin to valorise the brutality of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and to demonise the protesters in its path.

Noem is a grandmother, although she doesn’t look it, a living embodiment of Maga’s fiat for women to get sprogged up before the age of 25 and then stay that age forever. We learned about the existence of her granddaughter, Addie, when Grandma Kristi spoke gushingly to a 2023 NRA forum about Addie’s appetite for gun ownership. “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too.” Addie at this point was not quite two years old.

Noem has always been an advocate of owning guns and using them. Before she became Trump’s second-term Homeland Security Secretary, she was the Republican governor of South Dakota, a local politician in the Sarah Palin mode who grew up on a ranch. She became best known to international observers as a woman who had shot her own dog – and then implied she’d like to do the same to Joe Biden’s German shepherd.

A memoir released in April 2024 was supposed to position Noem as a Trump running mate: instead, it started a national debate about whether it was really appropriate to shoot Cricket, a wirehead pointer, after Cricket escaped Noem’s control on a pheasant hunt.........

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