Cricket the dog gets last laugh as cruel Trump aide finally gets the boot

Let’s not pretend this was a surprise. Kristi Noem finally got fired, and if there is a God, somewhere out there Cricket the dog is happily wagging her tail.

Because killing Cricket the dog is the act for which this pathetic excuse for a human being will primarily be known to history. Not a stateswoman. Not a security expert. Not an intelligence expert. Not even intelligent. Not even a competent bureaucrat, in an administration full of incompetents.

Noem is, and will always and forever be, the woman who shot her own dog then bragged about it in a book, genuinely seeming to think it would make people think her fit for office.

That tells you everything you need to know about Noem’s judgment, her empathy, and the yawning void where her soul should be. She is an empty shell of a human being, lacquered in phoniness.

Her tenure as Homeland Security Secretary was a daily soap opera about an aged beauty pageant contestant craving a return to the limelight, wailing across all manner of media, social and otherwise, “Look at me, look at me, look at me,” all while inflicting relentless, performative cruelties on citizens and immigrants alike.

Her time as a cabinet secretary was a constantly staged show with a single cast member, filmed for TV, Instagram, TikTok and all paid for by you and me, the great American taxpayers.

Cricket the dog just bit birds Noem didn’t want her to bite. This week, Noem’s own actions came back to bite her, when it was disclosed that an “advertising” company that got almost a quarter-million-dollar federal windfall for a campaign to promote Noem was shadier than her eyelids.

The campaign for the made-up cowgirl was shot at Mount Rushmore. At least Noem’s stone-cold face fit the venue.

She became a running joke. Even when Trump finally dumped her, he gave her an outlandish title: Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas. WTF?

Good luck to … The Shield of the Americas. Whatever that is. Noem wouldn’t know a policy if it hit her in the face — because it would just bounce off anyway.

While migrant children sat in DHS internment camps that would embarrass a third-world dictatorship — filthy, overcrowded, unfit for humans — Noem’s heavily made-up visage was being plastered across a multi-million dollar ad campaign she personally championed.

That pancake-shellacked face, immortalized so devastatingly by South Park, interrupted America’s evening TV like an ICE agent kicking in the door. The irony that she expended more energy on marketing herself than protecting anyone was apparently lost on her. It was not lost on us.

Then came this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, perhaps the most satisfying slice of political TV since, well, Trump tripped up the stairs to Air Force One.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-SC), a Republican, took Noem to pieces. All of us who loathed her were cheering him on.

Tillis was smart. He highlighted that which will haunt Noem forever: what she did to Cricket. Tillis scolded Noem, criticizing her for killing a 14-month-old hunting dog: "You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training and then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it's a leadership lesson about choices."

My dogs, Freddy and Cooper, are better leaders than Noem could ever hope to be.

Under Noem, ICE agents prowled neighborhoods like an occupying force, targeting people of color in a campaign directed by a white-nationalist alien, Stephen Miller. He was Noem’s real boss, feeding her talking points like a handler feeding a snake.

She oversaw the shooting deaths of two people in Minneapolis, American citizens she viciously and falsely branded as terrorists. She refused to apologize to the families.

She was tone deaf to a fault. Visiting a maximum security prison in El Salvador, she wore a $50,000 Rolex, creating what may be the single most heinous image of an out-of-touch administration, overflowing with golden excess.

And then there was the alleged affair with Corey Lewandowski. The old Trump attack dog — the only sort of dog Noem likes, or at least one she hasn’t dragged to the gravel pit yet — was kicked out on Thursday too.

During the Senate hearing, Noem’s husband sat behind her as senators asked point-blank whether she was sleeping with her aide and adviser.

She couldn’t say no. She wouldn’t say no. How could she say no? All while her husband sat behind her, sucking in the fumes from 10 pounds of hairspray hardened hair.

Noem entered office with nothing but blow-dried ambition. She had no intelligence background. No security experience. Nothing that qualified her to run a department tasked with keeping 330 million Americans safe.

She has already written one book about killing things. Chances are, now she’s been kicked out of Trumpland, she’ll write another, about her time in government. Allow me to suggest a title: The Banality of Evil. It’s that or Lassie Go Home.

The old cliché says that when you’ve done your job, and it’s time to move on, you walk off into the sunset. Not Noem. She’s taking the down escalator — the express — to a fire-drenched hell, where she won’t need her special blanket.

And Cricket, looking down from doggie heaven, is having the last laugh.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”