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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Comedian Matt Friend made a joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner about South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's admission that she killed her own dog.
Impersonating former president Donald Trump, Friend said it was "a tremendous opportunity to be at the most failed dinner anybody's ever seen" before launching into jokes that referenced current events.
"Let's face it, folks. I'm on fire right now, like the guy outside the courthouse, right?" he said, referencing a man who set himself on fire outside the courthouse where Trump's hush money criminal trial is taking place.
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"Not soon enough, not soon enough," he said, when the joke elicited a mixed reaction from the audience. "But I will tell you I am killing this dinner harder than Kristi Noem kills the puppies."
Noem's office has been contacted for comment via email.
Noem, a Republican and a potential running mate for Trump, drew backlash this week after The Guardian reported that she describes shooting her 14-month-old dog Cricket in her soon-to-be released book, No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward.
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According to The Guardian, Noem says she included the story of Cricket, a wirehaired pointer she was training for pheasant hunting, to illustrate her willingness to do anything "difficult, messy and ugly" if it needs to be done.
Noem writes that she took Cricket on a hunting trip with older dogs hoping to calm down the puppy.
Instead, Cricket went "out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life."
On the way home from the hunting trip, Noem writes that she stopped to talk to a family. Cricket got out of Noem's truck and attacked some of the family's chickens, killing some, then bit her.
Cricket behaved like "a trained assassin," she writes. Noem repeatedly apologized to the distraught family, wrote them a check and helped them dispose of the carcasses, she writes.
"I hated that dog," Noem writes, deeming her "untrainable" and "dangerous to anyone she came in contact with."
"At that moment," Noem writes, "I realized I had to put her down." She grabbed her gun, led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her. "It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done," she writes.
Noem writes that her family also owned a "nasty and mean" male goat that smelled bad and liked to chase her children. She decided to kill the goat in the same manner as Cricket, but she writes that the goat survived the first shot she fired, so she went back to the truck, got another shell, then shot him again.
The book excerpts prompted immediate criticism on social media from both Democrats and Republicans.
"Kristi Noem is trash," Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project, a conservative group that opposes Trump, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel ... but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point."
Noem defended herself on social media.
"We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm," she wrote on X. "Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years."
Update 4/28/24, 4:20 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.
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