What the hell is up with Republicans and dogs?!

This is Selkie. She’s my three-year-old Irish doodle, and yesterday I spent hours deep-cleaning my living room rug and the floor boards underneath because of her. Selkie has a recessed vulva, a polite way of saying she gets dirt in her hoo-ha all the time, which causes UTIs. My smart, affectionate, protective little ewok dog sometimes pees on the rug, because she can’t help it.

I’m happy to do the extra work on the floors, because we love her to bits. She and my 4-year-old son ran around for an hour last night, taking turns play-chasing each other, both clearly having a blast. When we got back Sunday night from a weekend trip, my spouse and I vowed our next getaway would be dog-friendly so we could bring her.

Selkie was napping next to me yesterday when I read this Guardian story about the latest Republican reported to have abused a dog. This time it’s Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025. Former coworkers say he told them he beat his neighbor’s dog to death with a shovel because it wouldn’t stop barking. Roberts denies this, but the neighbors confirmed that yes, their dog barked a lot, and she went missing right in the relevant timeframe.

To which I say: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH REPUBLICANS AND THEIR HATRED OF DOGS?!

To wit:

North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem boasted in her memoir this year of shooting her dog Cricket for the sin of misbehaving off-leash, after demonstrating repeatedly she would misbehave off-leash. Noem apparently included the story to show how leaders like her make hard decisions, not how unhappy people blame others, even puppies, for problems they created.

The scandal around the dog murder may have cost her the VP spot on Donald Trump’s 2024 ticket — odd considering Trump is no fan of dogs either. In 2016, I and others noted Trump’s propensity for using the phrase “like a dog” on social media. Obama dumped his reverend like a dog, Kristen Stewart cheated on her boyfriend like a dog, Mitt Romney choked in 2012 like a dog, the U.S. dropped Egypt’s dictator like a dog, Ted Cruz fired a staffer like a dog, George Will got thrown off ABC like a dog, and a National Review editor begged him for money like a dog.

In Trump’s world, dogs are disrespected, neglected and abandoned. If he perceives you as being cast off or made low in some way, well, that reminds him of a dog.

Does that sound like the role dogs play in your life?

Here’s our senior rescue Stitch, may she rest in peace, in 2019. We got her a little “Dog of Honor” bandana to wear at our wedding.

The never-Trump wing of the Republican party is not immune to dog abuse, either. Sen. Mitt Romney was criticized during his presidential runs for taking a 12-hour drive in 1983 with his dog Seamus inside a dog carrier tied to roof of his car. Seamus apparently got explosive diarrhea up there, leading Romney to hose down dog and carrier at a gas station before continuing the trip with a now-wet dog on the roof of the car. Romney defended himself by saying he’d attached a “windshield” to the carrier, he didn’t know this was illegal, and that Seamus “liked it.” (Dogs pant when they are scared, not just when they’re happy)

Then there’s Trump’s newest supporter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The number of animals he’s allegedly mistreated could fill Noah’s Ark and includes the carcass of an unidentified animal on a barbecue spit, which he held in a photo he texted to a friend last year “with a recommendation to visit the best dog restaurant in Seoul,” the friend told Vanity Fair.

Did his cruelty to animals make him susceptible to right-wing nutjobs, or did his susceptibility to right-wing nutjobs make him cruel to animals?

Over the summer, Trump supporters falsely accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz of replacing his dog Scout with another dog. JD Vance, perhaps in a bid to appear more normal, has been bringing his dog Atlas on the campaign trail, revealing he has absolutely no idea how to hold a leash.

Then there’s the rumor Vance admitted he “create[d],” that Trump blurted out on the debate stage, and that keeps with the right’s increasing reliance on accusing others of doing the thing they’re doing: The lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing and eating dogs.

I think of my late step-dad Earl — a Nebraska-raised economist and centrist Democrat big on responsibility, Clint Eastwood movies and the occasional sexist joke — who taught me how to properly hold our Australian shepherd Chief’s leash when I was nine. Earl died in 2006, and I sometimes wonder if he were still here, might he have taken the hard-right turn so many white men like him have in recent years?

But then I think of the way my stoic step-dad sobbed when Chief died. Of how he rushed to the animal shelter when he learned an unhoused man who froze to death on our town’s main street had a dog. Of how he told me repeatedly the worst thing he ever saw was the scene in “Pale Rider” where the bad guy shoots the dog. You never hurt the dog.

Mark Twain once said he hoped to go to dog heaven, not man’s. If it exists, I have no doubt you’d find my step-dad there, too. I think the inverse is also true: If there’s a hell, there are no dogs there, but it’s filled with people who hate dogs.