The French government has joined the chorus of detractors taking aim at the South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political autobiography No Going Back, which many now see as having eliminated her chances of being Donald Trump’s vice-presidential selection.
Days after Noem removed a passage claiming she had met with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron.
According to NBC News, Noem claims in her book that she cancelled a planned meeting between her and Macron in November after she accused him of making “pro-Hamas” comments.
“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet, he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So I decided to cancel.”
Yet a French official told the outlet there is no record of a scheduled meeting with Noem – nor had they invited her.
“Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel,” Noem’s spokesperson, Ian Fury, told NBC. Fury added that “the governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day parade at Arc de Triomphe” – a ceremony that took place on 16 November.
Fury said that Macron had not attended, though Associated Press news video suggests he did. Noem had been in Paris in November 2023 to speak at the Worldwide Freedom Initiative conference.
While Noem does not describe what Macron’s comments were that she objected to, her office pointed to his remarks urging Israel to stop bombing Gaza while also acknowledging “the right of Israel to protect itself and react”.
The Guardian has reached out to Noem’s office for clarification.
Last week, Noem acknowledged that she “should not have put [an] anecdote in the book” in which she described meeting Kim Jong-un – and feeling underestimated by him – because that purported encounter with the North Korean dictator never happened.
Nonetheless, she later insisted she had “met with many, many world leaders” and had “travelled around the world”.
An excerpt from the book lists a number of world leaders whom Noem had met with while serving in Congress, including the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.
Damaging embellishments are hardly unusual to the political class. Hillary Clinton came out on the wrong side of a fact-checking drama in 2008 when she was unsuccessfully running for the Democratic presidential nomination and claimed she arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and had to run with her head down.
But Noem may have done more damage to her standing by repeating a 20-year-old story about shooting dead a working dog on her ranch. She explained that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, did not point out game on animal hunts, killed a neighbor’s chickens, and acted aggressively toward her family.
Noem also described shooting dead the family’s billy goat, which the governor said “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them”, leaving them “terrified”.
It took Noem two shots to kill off the goat, which also had a “wretched smell”, Noem wrote.
Criticism has been heaped on Noem from both sides of the political spectrum over the dog, but less so the goat.
It was reported last weekend that Noem left a political fundraiser lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort early last weekend as the former president offered onstage introductions of various contenders to be his running mate in November’s rematch with Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election.
“She had a rough couple of days,” Trump told Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin last week. “I will say that.”
