Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota would like to speak to the manager.
The Republican took to social media on Sunday to complain that she’d been unfairly grilled by Margaret Brennan in a catastrophic appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation hours earlier, alleging that her Democratic counterparts would never have been subjected to such fierce interrogation.
Having crunched the numbers, Noem posted on X: “This morning in our 15-minute interview, Margaret Brennan interrupted me 36 times—once every 25 seconds on average.”
Though her math checks out, the governor was not actually “interrupted” by Brennan nearly as much as she claimed. As Noem steamrolled through her answers to the CBS host’s questions, Brennan attempted to interject just over a dozen times, resulting in crosstalk that just as often ended with Noem continuing to plough forward without answering the query.
Noem clearly felt the heat even in the midst of the interview, however. At one point, her expression still perfectly neutral, the governor asked, “Why am I being treated differently than every other person that you’ve interviewed? You don’t interrupt other people. You let them talk.”
She pressed that point in her X post.
“But when liberals like [Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer] and [former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] are on @FaceTheNation, they aren’t interrupted once,” Noem said.
“In the fake news media, there are two sets of rules, and conservative[s] are always treated differently,” she continued. “That’s why Americans don’t trust the Fake News.”
Noem struggled to keep to her talking points in the CBS interview, insisting to Brennan—who opened by asking whether the governor had actually ever met Kim Jong Un, as her upcoming book claimed—that she wasn’t going to talk about her “specific” encounters with world leaders, of whom she’d met “many, many.”
Center Street, the publisher of her memoir No Going Back, which is set to be released this week, announced Sunday that it would remove the passage in question “upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook editions.”
But it did not address what may have happened to allow the seemingly false passage to make its way into print.
“Further questions about about the passage should be referred to the author, ” Center Street added.
The governor also continued to defend her decision to kill a troublesome hunting dog around two decades ago, insisting she didn’t regret the possibly career-ending decision to disclose that she once shot a 14-month-old puppy in the face. “As a mom, I made a choice between protecting my children, and protecting them from a dangerous animal that was killing livestock and attacking people,” Noem said.
She similarly dug her heels in while addressing a passage of her book in which she appears to suggest that President Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, should meet a similar fate to Cricket.
“At the end of the book, you say the very first thing you would do if you got to the White House… is that you’d make sure ‘Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds. Commander, say hello to Cricket.’ Are you doing this to try to look tough?” Brennan asked.
“Well, number one, Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” Noem said. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it?”
Brennan then correctly pointed out that Commander, who has indeed bitten around two dozen Secret Service personnel, has since been removed from the White House and sent to live with relatives of the president.
“You’re saying [Commander] should be shot?” the host asked.
“That’s what the president should be accountable to,” Noem replied. “What is the number?”
No Going Back, which Noem repeatedly described on Face the Nation as a “how-to guide” for Americans looking “to have input into their government,” hits shelves on Tuesday.
