In other words, they produced a typical pre-campaign book, where the first rule is to do no harm. Somewhat unusually for the genre, that book, 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland, landed the South Dakota governor on the New York Times’ bestseller list, adding to the consensus that the Donald Trump devotee had a big future in GOP politics.

What it didn’t do, of course, was spark a weeklong news cycle — and a round of obituaries for that same political future — by including a tale about Noem leading a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket to a gravel pit and shooting him to death after he ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.

This time around, Noem has a different team in place, as well as a different imprint, Hachette’s conservative-leaning Center Street. And the folks behind her new book, No Going Back, didn’t get in the way of sharing memories about gunning down an ill-trained puppy.

Kirsti Noem’s publisher in 2022: “This is a horrible story. We can’t include this, Dick Cheney only got away with his hunting trip scandal because he shot a lawyer and not a puppy.”

Kristi Noem’s new Conservative publisher in 2024: “People will be impressed with how tough you are on puppy crime.”