(“Drunk and Stoned Brilliant Dead”/National Lampoon)
Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for just $2/month!
Thank you for signing up for The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Thank you for registering. For more on The Nation, check out the latest issue. Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for just $2 a month! Supporting progressive journalism, The Nation is supported by readers. Help us keep writing about issues that matter by making a tip of $10 or more. Join our wine club today! Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
October surprises are expected in election years, and this time the Republicans are also preparing some serious Halloween jump scares. As Donald Trump and J.D. Vance continue to lie about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, the real Republican Pet Sematary has begun to haunt Trumpworld. Like many of Trump’s accusations, this one doubles as a confession, and includes some MAGA beacons and grotesque stories of animal abuse. Let’s start with the NRA’s new president, Douglas Hamlin.
Mr. Hamlin took the NRA post this summer and, against all odds, succeeded in further tarnishing the scandal-plagued and financially strapped gun control group’s tradition. In 1979, Hamlin and four other fraternity brothers decided to remove a pet cat from the Alpha Phi Delta fraternity at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, that refused to use the litter box. At the time, Hamlin was serving as Speaker of the House. He and his brothers burned the cat, dismembered it, tied it up with string and displayed it publicly. More horrifying details can be found here.
After word of the incident spread on campus, Ann Arbor student Shelagh Abbs Winter alerted school authorities. As a result of the investigation, Hamlin and his accomplice were sentenced to 200 hours of community service and expelled from the fraternity. At sentencing, the judge accused Hamlin of taking no leadership role in preventing the atrocity. Appalled legal scholars had no way of predicting the current political moment, where MAGA zealots see brutality as a feature rather than a bug. Hamlin, an embarrassment at the time, now looks like a visionary ahead of his time. He demonstrated incredible leadership skills during the Trump era, perfectly training him for his current role as America’s chief apologist for school massacres and domestic violence mass shootings.
If Hamlin’s incident were an isolated case, it could be dismissed as one man’s early mistakes. Unfortunately, this story went unreported less than a month after Heritage Foundation President Kenneth Roberts’ own pet murders surfaced. Roberts also serves as the intellectual driving force behind Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump administration. Project 2025 is so politically toxic that Mr. Trump denies knowing its contents or even meeting Mr. Roberts — with whom he shares a private flight and 307 on Project 2025. Despite employing well over half of the population. Authors of his first administration, past campaigns, and transition team.
In 2004, when Roberts was working as a history professor at the University of Arizona, he more than once delighted his faculty colleagues with stories about his neighbor’s barking dog. The baby’s cries continued to bother the Roberts family, and the baby was unable to sleep. His former co-workers remember Roberts saying he finally solved the problem by hitting the dog to death with a shovel. Roberts now denies that the incident happened, just as he denies any meeting with President Trump. But would anyone repeatedly brag to their co-workers that they actually beat a dog to death, even if they were lying at the time? Just like Douglas Hamlin hung that cat on a string, that’s what he wanted people to know about him. This puts Roberts in a difficult position at the Heritage Foundation. In Trump’s Republican Party, claiming he killed a dog he didn’t kill is tantamount to stolen courage and could cost Trump his job.
popular
“Swipe bottom left to see other authors” → Swipe
popular
“Swipe bottom left to see other authors” → Swipe
A similar situation of moral twilight permeates the most notorious stories of MAGA-aligned pet killings. South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kirstie Noem, has decided to shoot and kill Cricket, a wire-haired pointer. In her memoir, Noem lamented that her 14-month-old dog was difficult to train and proved to be causing problems on the farm, so she moved Cricket to a nearby gravel pit with a misbehaving goat. He decided to take them in and kill them with a shotgun. . The governor defended her actions, claiming that Cricket was not a puppy (which is technically correct), but a “working dog”. Apparently, Noem feels that when Cricket took the job on the ranch, he was old enough to understand that the job was dangerous. None of these are Old Yeller scenes depicting a heartbreaking separation from a family friend. These are the scenes that FBI serial killer profilers should study.
Unlike Roberts and Hamlin, who have learned from experience that people view these acts as abhorrent, Noem has no problem making public her past of killing dogs. She first tried to publish the story in a book, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons From the Heartland. Her staff pushed back and convinced her to take it out. Amazingly, she retells that story in her latest book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, which will likely wake up and overturn weak political teams. But he played it again. As President Trump’s running mate, Noem’s confidence that his cricket coverage will score points with MAGA believers is attributable to how anecdotes of personal brutality have rapidly become a staple of Republican debate over the past two years. It eloquently explains how it has become a distinctive feature. The idea seems to be that if you can’t kill puppies, how can you deal with the border crisis? Like many MAGA ideas, it went viral as soon as it was exposed to the air, proving to the public that it was so miscalculated that it destroyed Noem’s ambitions to be on Trump’s presidential ticket. Nevertheless, she remains a member of President Trump’s glamorous inner circle. She recently played the role of facilitator at a now-infamous town hall event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where President Trump wandered into a 39-minute trance dance. Latest issue
Noem, Roberts, and Hamlin’s story is about people who, because they were unable to train or control the animal, personally chose to take up arms and kill it. For most of us in the same situation, the first thought would be to take our obnoxious cat or dog to an animal shelter and adopt them. Pick up a shovel? Dissecting a cat? Do you flaunt it at work, or do you see it as your personal profile with the courage to inflate your political resume? As Gov. Tim Walz says, it’s downright bizarre.
In the past, politicians used pets to make themselves seem more human. For Republicans who ran against President Franklin Roosevelt and his beloved Scottish terrier, Fala, in 1944, even attacking a pet with rhetoric, let alone killing it, proved to be a political disaster. When New York Governor Thomas Dewey ran against FDR, Republicans tried to capitalize on FDR’s false narrative. After the presidential visit, a naval destroyer was dispatched to the Aleutian Islands, leaving Farah behind. Republicans accused FDR of wasting vast amounts of tax and military resources to bring Fala back to Washington during the war. Republican line of attack: Paint FDR as a Democrat who cared enough about his pets to endanger national security.
FDR’s response followed the approach envisioned by film director Orson Welles, and he deftly retorted. “These Republican leaders are not satisfied with their attacks on me, my wife, and my sons,” FDR said in a September 23, 1944, speech to the Teamsters. “No, I’m not satisfied with that and now that includes my little dog, Farrah. Of course I don’t resent the attack and my family doesn’t resent the attack. But Farrah is outraged by the attack. You know, Farah is a Scotch, and he’s a Scotsman, but Republican novelists, both in and out of Congress, have told me that I left him in the Aleutian Islands and sent the destroyer back. As soon as he learned that he had made up the story that he was a Scotsman, at a cost to the taxpayers of 2, 3, 8, or 20 million dollars, his Scotch spirit was furious. It’s gone.”
By anthropomorphizing Farrah, they not only silenced the rumors, but also made Dewey look like a clown. In 1952, even Richard Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate, appealed to the dog’s integrity to save his political career. Opponents accused Nixon of accepting $18,000 from donors at a time when such things were scandalous. Nixon appeared on national television and revealed his income, his mortgage, and everything the Nixons owned and rented. Then he pulls off a masterstroke that humanizes him and makes him seem likable, at least momentarily. He talked about supporters who sent him campaign gifts. “One more thing, I should probably tell you, or they’ll probably say the same thing about me. After the election, we received something, a gift… that. Do you know what it was? It was a small black and white spotted cocker spaniel that he had shipped all the way from Texas in a wooden box. We named it “Checkers.” And you know, kids love dogs just like any other kids, and I just want to say this right now, no matter what they say about dogs, we’re going to get a dog. . ”
Yes, Nixon also loved dogs. By contrast, Donald Trump may become the first American president to openly loathe them. To Trump, there is nothing lower than a dog, and nothing is more defamatory than being called a dog. “He died like a dog. He died like a coward,” is how President Trump described the death of suspected ISIS terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Noem, Hamlin, and Roberts all rose to the top of the Republican machine in different ways, but what they all share with Trump is his unsympathetic worldview.
Not since Theodore Roosevelt strode onto the national stage have Republicans been so gleeful about killing animals. As a boy, TR also engaged in amateur taxidermy. Growing up, Colonel Roosevelt loved big game hunting, playing the role of a fearless American who faced off against lions and grizzly bears. He interpreted the whole massacre as a scientific study and donated the rare animals he killed to the Smithsonian Institution. By killing animals, they became even rarer. By his own count, he killed 11,397 specimens at the Smithsonian Institution alone. However, later scholars have disputed TR’s self-reported carcass count, putting it closer to 5,000. And he will definitely consider those scholars as detractors.
Still, even TR drew the line at brutality for its own sake. The teddy bear is famously named after the 26th president, but its origins date back to 1902, when a small bear was chained to a tree in order to shoot the president. TR could not bring himself to kill a helpless bear in this way. Perhaps he missed the moment to pull the trigger for the first time in his life. The president’s choice not to kill animals was so remarkable that it made national news and prompted the Steiff toy company to name its new line of stuffed bears “Teddy Bears.” To understand the magnitude of the irony here, remember that Colonel Sanders released only one chicken in his life and got an adorable Disney chick character named “Sandy” after him. Imagine.
Today in the MAGAverse, President Roosevelt’s decision to save a bear results in him being lost as a RINO infected with the Wakened Mind Virus. MAGAfied GOP leaders have turned killing family pets into a point of pride. This shows the empathy chip is missing, but in case you’re worried that Republican candidates will reverse family separation for deportation and denial of medical care to pregnant women. Mr. Trump and J.D. Vance may promote ridiculous fantasies about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, but they can also commit cold-blooded murders of pets and treating the military like dogs against their fellow Americans. They are the ones celebrating sexuality.
