'Right-wing purity test': Analyst ties Republicans' brash cruelty toward animals to Trump
A growing number of Republicans are doing cruel things to children's dogs then bragging about it in a new trend with ties to the former president, a new political analysis contends.
Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, joined the elite crew this week when his former New Mexico State University colleagues said he'd boasted of killing his 16-year-old neighbor's dog Loca with a shovel — a story the Project 2025 architect now denies.
"Killing a teenage neighbor’s pet out of irritation and then telling co-workers about it might seem like a whole new level of bizarre," wrote Heather Souvaine Horn for the New Republic. "In some ways, that denial is the most unusual part of this whole story."
Horn argues a mounting number of Republicans not only torment children's animals — but express pride after the fact.
Most notably among the crew is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who boasted in her book that she shot her family's 14-month-old puppy without apparently warning her 7-year-old daughter Kennedy what was about to happen.
"Where's Cricket?" Kennedy reportedly asked when she came home from school.
There's also Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) who accidentally strapped his five sons' Irish Setter Seamus on top of the family station wagon for a 12-hour road trip in 1983.
On Thursday, Horn argued the three Republicans were merely building on a long history of Republicans expecting praise for hurting animals that began with vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who liked to shoot wolves.
"[Palin's] support for aerial wolf gunning—a practice deliberately designed to give hunters the advantage and thin out wolf numbers—was denounced by animal lovers but lauded by her supporters, who loved her “frontier femme” identity politics," wrote Horn.
But the tradition only reached a national level when it was picked up by the family Trump, Zorn argued.
"In 2011, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Zimbabwe with a safari firm that Zimbabwean conservationists later said was not registered in the country," reported Horn. "They killed an elephant and leopard, among other animals, posing with the dead bodies."
A subsequent ProPublica report found Trump Jr. had shot an endangered argali sheep and received a retroactive permit to do so.
In the White House, the Trump administration reversed bans on importing lion trophies into the U.S., re-legalized killing wolf pups and using bait to kill bears in Alaska, Horn reports.
Trump famously was the first president in more than a century not to bring a dog to the White House — his late wife Ivana once explained her ex was "not a dog fan."
"It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that willingness to kill animals would become a kind of right-wing purity test," Horn concluded.
"So maybe Kevin Roberts bragged at work about killing his kid neighbor’s dog with a shovel, or maybe he didn’t. At this point in the history of American conservatism, he’s going to have a tough time convincing people to give him the benefit of the doubt."