DOG DAYS — Another week, another gruesome political headline about pets. This time, the focus is on Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 mastermind, who allegedly bragged to colleagues and dinner guests that he had used a shovel to kill a noisy neighborhood dog that was keeping his baby awake. Roberts has flatly denied the claims, which appeared today in the Guardian. That’s more than you can say for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another popular figure on the far right. In May, Noem was at the center of a media storm after publishing a memoir where she proudly describes leading her own wirehaired pointer to a gravel pit and shooting her to death after the dog ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens. These pet headlines, of course, bookended a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump and JD Vance’s unfounded claims that Haitian migrants have been killing and eating people’s dogs and cats. In that case, the MAGA pols appear to be of the view that killing innocent pooches is bad. Given Trump’s well-documented disdain for dogs, though, you could understand if some people are confused. In fact, if you look back at how American politicians have talked about pets for the last century or two, the whole series of outrages seems especially bizarre. Dogs, in particular, turn out to be a fascinating prism for understanding the culture of politics. And, these days, they’re a pretty clear indication of how that culture is changing: Political pets were the ultimate symbol of relatability in a culture that valued unity. And now they’re another dystopian motif in an age that has elevated conflict. In ancient times, leaders kept pets, too. But in those days, house pets were how potentates elevated themselves above the masses: Our ruler is so rich and powerful, the logic went, that he can afford to feed and care for an animal with no economic utility whatsoever. In China, the Han emperor Ling had his dogs sleep on ornate carpets and gave them personal bodyguards. In Britain, Mary, Queen of Scots outfitted her lapdogs in blue velvet suits. In an age when people could barely feed themselves — much less support an animal that wasn’t there to work or be eaten — the tales of pet largesse only served to make the sovereign seem even more exotic and fearsome. In America, too, up through the Gilded Age, pets became a way for the wealthy to show off their status. Thorstein Veblen, the sociologist who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” took note of this in his 1899 magnum opus Theory of the Leisure Class: “As he is an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men’s regard as a thing of good repute.” But things shifted dramatically in the more democratic middle-class U.S. society of the 20th century. Instead of being a way for pols to show off their might, pets became a way for the most powerful person in the country to play at being an everyman. Sure, Franklin Roosevelt may have been a patrician who radically expanded the federal government during the Great Depression, but when he talked about his beloved Scottie, Fala, he was just another guy who loved his pooch. And on it went, up through Barack Obama, who announced plans to get a dog soon after his improbable victory. Just like that, a political phenom about to enter the world’s least relatable residence was just another middle-class dad hoping his kids would walk the dog like they’d promised. Four years later, Obama was helped to reelection because his opponent, Mitt Romney, had previously been caught in a mini-scandal of his own. It involved reports that, in the name of fitting everyone into the station wagon for a trip to Canada, Romney had once put the family Irish Setter in a crate atop the car, much to the animal’s distress. Ironically, the family anecdote that spurred the news cycle had been meant to show the fantastically wealthy candidate was himself also just a vacation-planning regular dad. It didn’t matter: Romney was pilloried over the anecdote, including from fellow conservatives like rival candidate Newt Gingrich and TV host Tucker Carlson. “I’m feeling that maybe Mitt Romney lost my vote here,” Carlson said on his MSNBC show after the story first broke. Would a conservative pol’s hard-hearted canine treatment generate the same criticism today, in a movement whose leader is fond of adding “like a dog” to statements about people being fired, killed, or dumped? Perhaps not. And I think it indicates that something has changed in the way people think about politics, not just pets. Where political pets once went from making a leader look exotic to making a candidate seem relatable, we’ve entered an era where seeming relatable is no longer always a priority. Instead, particularly on the MAGA right, the priority is on seeming willing to bust taboos — or to fight for old taboos that you’re accusing the smart set of abandoning. The headlines involving pets in American politics this summer are contradictory, but the common denominator is one in which the family pooch becomes not a symbol of American domestic bliss, but as a battlefield of embattled social rules. In the case of Noem’s book, she uses the tale of her pet-killing as an example of the sort of tough decisions she had to make as a farmer, the sorts of decisions namby-pamby blue-state progressives presumably don’t understand. Being willing to gun down a dog, in this frame, is a sign of courage, of rising above the weak-willed elite. That appears to have been the moral of Roberts’ story, too. Helping Noem’s narrative, if not her post-publication PR challenges, is the fact that she was able to set her story against a brilliant example of weak-willed elite: Joe Biden, who brought dogs back to the White House after the canine-free Trump presidency. Biden’s ill-trained dogs proceeded to maul numerous staffers with little immediate consequence. Noem said she’d never have put up with that misbehavior. The Springfield story also deploys dogs as a battle cry — in this case, from the other direction. In the discredited telling of Vance (himself a professed dog lover), Haitians were stealing and eating people’s pets. Eating dogs or cats, of course, is another American taboo. But this time, it was a taboo that he implied he would stand up for even as immigrant-coddling progressives allegedly looked the other way. It’s dystopia, not the American dream. It’s worth noting that the bizarre pet tales of 2024 politics haven’t really worked out for whoever’s telling them. Noem’s dog-killing story may have killed her vice presidential hopes. Trump’s “they’re eating the pets” spurred viral mockery. Americans, it seems, still want pets to be a happy, shared subject of devotion. It’s not clear whether this is something their political class can deliver. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mschaffer@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @michaelschaffer.
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