We expect October surprises in an election year, but this time out the GOP has also offered up some serious Halloween jump scares. In a season when Donald Trump and JD Vance continue to lie about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, a genuine Republican Pet Sematary has emerged to haunt Trumpworld. As with so many Trump accusations, this one doubles as an admission, involving several of MAGA’s guiding lights and tales of grotesque animal cruelty. Let’s start with the NRA’s new president, Douglas Hamlin. 

Hamlin took the NRA post this summer, and against all odds managed to tarnish the legacy of the scandal-plagued, financially strapped gun lobby even further. In 1979, Hamlin and four other fraternity brothers decided to rid their University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Alpha Phi Delta fraternity of a house cat that did not care to use its litterbox. At the time, Hamlin served as president of the house; he and his frat brothers proceeded to burn, dismember, and publicly displayed the cat by stringing it up. The grislier details can be found here. 

As word spread of the incident on campus, fellow Ann Arbor student Shelagh Abbs Winter reported it the school authorities. After an investigation, Hamlin and his accomplices were sentenced to 200 hours of community service and expelled from their fraternity. At their sentencing, the judge singled Hamlin out for utterly failing in his leadership role to prevent the cruelty. There was no way for the appalled jurist to anticipate our current political moment, one in which MAGA zealots see cruelty as a feature, not a bug.  Shamed in his day, Hamlin now looks like  a visionary ahead of his time, who demonstrated incredible Trump-era leadership skills that perfectly trained him for his current role as America’s chief apologist for school massacres and domestic violence shootings.  

If Hamlin’s was an isolated instance, maybe you could dismiss it as one man’s youthful mistake. Unfortunately, the story broke less than a month after Heritage Foundation President Kenneth Roberts’ own pet-slaying saga surfaced.  Roberts also serves as the intellectual engine behind Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration that’s so politically toxic that Trump has denied knowing what’s in it or even meeting Roberts—despite sharing private flights with Roberts and employing well over half of Project 2025’s 307 authors in his first administration, past campaigns, and transition teams.   

In 2004, when Roberts worked as a history professor at the University of Arizona, he more than once regaled his faculty colleagues with the story of a yapping dog that belonged to a neighbor. It’s yapping kept disturbing the Roberts’ family and kept a baby awake.  His former colleagues recall Roberts telling them that he finally solved the problem by beating the dog to death with a shovel.  Today, Roberts denies the incident ever happened, much as Trump denies every meeting him. But even if he was lying back then, why would anyone repeatedly boast to colleagues that they’d beaten a dog to death to if they hadn’t?  Like Douglas Hamlin stringing that cat up, it’s something that he wanted known about him. It puts Roberts in a tough spot at the Heritage Foundation, too.  In Trump’s GOP, claiming you killed a dog that you did not kill amounts to stolen valor, and he could lose his job.

Similar conditions of moral twilight suffuse the most notorious tale of MAGA-aligned pet killing: South Dakota GOP Gov. Kirsti Noem’s decision to gun down her wire-hair pointer Cricket. In her memoir, Noem lamented that the14-month-old dog was proving hard to train and problematic on her ranch, so she decided to take Cricket—together with a misbehaving goat—to a nearby gravel pit and put both animals down with her shotgun.  In defending her actions, the governor argued that Cricket was not a puppy (technically true), and was a “working dog.” Apparently, Noem feels Cricket was old enough to know the job on the her ranch was dangerous when he took it. None of these are Old Yeller scenes of heartbreaking farewells to a family friend. These are scenes for FBI serial killer profilers to study.

Unlike Roberts and Hamlin, who learned from experience that people saw these acts as repellent,  Noem has no problem going public with her dog killing past.  She first tried to publish the story in a book, Not My First Rodeo:  Lessons From the Heartland.  Her staffers pushed back and convinced her to take it out. Amazingly, she reprised the tale for her most recent book—presumably overruling her woke and weak political team —in No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. Noem’s confidence that the Cricket story would score points with the MAGA faithful as Trump’s running mate speaks volumes about how rapidly anecdotes of personal cruelty have become de rigueur features of Republican discourse over the past two years. If you can’t kill a puppy, the thinking seems to be, how can you face down the border crisis?  Like so many MAGA ideas, once it was exposed to air it burst into flames, and proved such a miscalculation with the general public that it it killed Noem’s ambitions to be on a Trump ticket. Despite that, she’s still in Trump’s charmed inner circle.  She recently played the role of fawning moderator at the now-infamous town hall event in Oaks, Penn., where Trump ambled his way into a 39-minute trance dance.

Noem, Roberts, and Hamlin’s stories are about people who could not train or control an animal, so they chose to pick up a weapon and kill it—personally. For most of us in the same situation, dropping the obnoxious cat or dog off at an animal shelter for adoption would be a first thought. Picking up a shovel? Dismembering a cat? Bragging about it at work or seeing it as your own personal profile in courage to pad your political resume? That, as Gov. Tim Walz would put it, is just weird.

In the past, politicians used pets to humanize themselves.  Even rhetorically attacking a pet, much less killing it, proved a political disaster for Republicans running against Franklin Roosevelt and his beloved Scottish terrier Fala in 1944.  As New York Gov. Thomas Dewey ran against FDR, Republicans sought to exploit an apocryphal story that FDR sent a navy destroyer to the Aleutians after a presidential visit where he left Fala behind. Republicans accused FDR of wasting an enormous amount of taxpayer money and military resources during the war to get Fala back to Washington. The GOP line of attack:  Portray FDR as a Democrat who cares too much about a pet, to the point of jeopardizing national security.

FDR’s response, which followed an approach sketched out by filmmaker Orson Welles, deftly rebutted them. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” FDR said at a September 23, 1944 address to the Teamsters. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 million—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.”

Humanizing Fala shut down not only the rumors, but also made Dewey look like a buffoon. In 1952, even Richard Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s embattled running mate, saved his political career with an appeal to canine probity. Opponents accused Nixon of taking $18,000 from donors, back when such things were scandalous. Nixon went on national TV to lay out his income, mortgage, and everything the Nixons owned and owed. Then he delivered the master stroke that humanized him, and at least momentarily, made him seem likable. He told of a supporter who did send him a campaign gift. “One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election … You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it ‘Checkers.’ And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Yes, even Nixon liked dogs. By contrast, Donald Trump may be the first American president to openly loathe them. For Trump, there is nothing lower than a dog, and no greater slur exists than to be called a “dog.”  “He died like a dog.  He died like a coward” is how Trump described the 2019 death of ISIS terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.  Noem, Hamlin, and Roberts have all ascended to the top of the GOP machine in various ways, but the one thing they all share with Trump is his empathy-challenged view of the world. 

Not since Theodore Roosevelt strode the national stage have Republicans taken such glee in killing animals. As a boy, TR even engaged in amateur taxidermy.  As an adult, Colonel Roosevelt loved big game hunting, presenting himself as the fearless American who faced down lions and grizzlies. He spun all this carnage as scientific work and donated rare animals he killed to the Smithsonian, animals he made even more rare by killing them. By his own tally, he killed 11,397 specimens in the Smithsonian alone—though later scholars dispute TR’s self-reported carcass count, placing the number closer to 5000—and he would no doubt see those scholars as detractors.

And yet even TR drew the line at cruelty for its own sake. The teddy bear is famously named after the 26^th president, and its origin dates back to an incident in 1902 where a small bear was chained to a tree for him to shoot. TR could not bring himself to kill a helpless bear this way—possibly the first moment in his life he passed on pulling a trigger. It was so noteworthy that the president chose not to kill an animal that it became a national news story, and inspired the Steiff toy company to name its new line of plushie bear cubs “teddy bears.” To appreciate the scale of irony here, imagine Colonel Sanders setting just one chicken free in his lifetime and getting an adorable Disney chick character named “Sandy” after him.

In today’s MAGAverse, Roosevelt’s decision to spare the bear would out him as a RINO infected by the woke mind virus. The leaders of the MAGAfied GOP have turned killing a house pet into something to brag about.  It shows the empathy chip is missing, in case you’re worried a Republican candidate might back down on breaking up families for deportation or refusing medical care to a pregnant woman. Trump and JD Vance may peddle lurid fantasies about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs, but it’s they who admire the callous murders of pets—and the prospect of turning the military on their fellow Americans, and treating them like dogs.