Weekend Report: What's happening?

Gov. Kristi Noem shot her dog and bragged about it. Biden mocks Trump, sits down with Howard Stern. Trump is trapped in "freezing" courtroom.

Social media was on fire on Friday over South Dakota’s GOP Governor Kristi Noem, a MAGA extremist who wrote in her new book about how she shot her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the dog couldn’t be trained to be a hunting dog—after what appears to have happened after one outing while hunting pheasant. As if this wasn’t ghastly enough, what becomes clear from her reasoning for telling the story in the book is that this is Noem’s audition to be Donald Trump’s running mate.

President Biden had a powerful week, starting off campaigning in Florida—Trump’s home state—letting it be known that the Sunshine State is in play. And in his speeches, he’s been mocking Trump mercilessly, in jabs that have got to be driving Trump crazy. Then the president—under fire from a petulant, arrogant New York Times for not yet giving an interview to the paper, which has obsessively and negatively written about his age—turned up on Howard Stern’s show, in studio at SiriusXM, for a full-length interview with the radio host who dumped his old pal Trump years ago, and spoke with a lucid, informed president about his accomplishments.

Trump, meanwhile, has been confined to criminal court all week, watching the opening witness, David Pecker, a former National Enquirer publisher and his former buddy, expose his election fraud scene. He’s used his press conferences after the trial to whine on about his terrible treatment, including how it’s “freezing” in the courtroom and claiming they’re doing it on purpose, and also to comment on current events. And none of it is working for him.