Kristi Noem has never been shy about showing the public what she’s willing to do with a weapon in her hands.
This week, she proved it again, and this time she didn’t need a memoir to do it.
The former Homeland Security secretary, who has spent most of 2026 trying to outrun headlines about her firing and the aide who tagged along on her farewell tour, hopped online to share what she clearly thought was a feel-good moment.
Noem shared six photos, a thank-you to friends, and the words “super fun” in a post from Sept. 21 that’s still causing her backlash days later.
Once people zoomed in, she ripped over on one detail and then logged back on to defend herself, but ended up making it worse.
The caption to her Instagram post opened innocently enough.
“Finally had a little time to post a few pictures of my archery elk,” the 54-year-old wrote. Noem credited a “super fun hunt with Patrick, Randy, Jason, and Taylor” and added that “the strategy and work paid off.”
The photos painted a scene not many wanted to see.
Noem kneels behind a massive bull elk with one hand wrapped around its antlers. Her compound bow is propped against the animal’s side, directly over an open wound still streaked with blood.
Her pose repeats across the carousel as members of the hunting party take turns beside Noem, all smiling. Instagram even flagged the post as sensitive content.
But Noem wasn’t going to let her critics have the last word. She posted her own reply in the comment section, and it was not an olive branch.
“For those of you who choose to be ignorant and uninformed and critical, of course this beautiful animal will nourish our family and many others we will share with,” she wrote. She added she had learned to hunt from her father and brothers.
Then she turned on her detractors: “Shame on you who desecrate and don’t understand the stewardship responsibilities God has given us. Go to a store and shop for anything that hasn’t been harvested and you will find bare shelves and your family will starve.”
Not long after, comments on the post were limited.
Before the lockdown, though, replies had already soared. Many of them came from people she would have a hard time calling uninformed.
“Why post something like this? You have little perception of how you are seen in the world,” one person wrote. Another kept it shorter: “Literally no one wants to see this.”
“Heartbreaking to see such a magnificent animal lose its life for sport,” a third commented. “Wildlife deserves our respect and protection, not to be treated as a trophy.”
Some of the sharpest pushback came from her own side of the aisle. “I’m a conservative as well but I don’t like this,” one follower wrote. “I understand hunting is necessary. But no need to glorify it with a dead animal teed up as a trophy to celebrate.”
A self-described conservative Christian went after the caption itself, arguing that you can’t call a kill “super fun” and then call it stewardship.
Not everyone piled on. Fellow hunters congratulated her on the size of the bull, and one simply asked if it was a 6×6.
For many readers, though, the photos landed on a reputation Noem built herself. In her 2024 memoir, “No Going Back,” she described shooting her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after deciding the dog was untrainable. The confession followed her even as she was floated as a possible Trump running mate.
The timing doesn’t help her either. Accoridng to the NPR, Trump fired Noem in March after a 13-month tenure defined by his mass deportation push and the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.
There was also the $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign that put her own face front and center. Instead of sending her home, Trump gave her a brand-new title… special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, his anti-cartel coalition in the Western Hemisphere.
That job put her back in the president’s orbit the very next day. On Sept. 22, Trump convened the coalition’s second meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he vowed to use “unmatched military might” against cartels. Noem posted that she was “so proud to stand with” Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The elk photos are still up.
Her personal life hasn’t gone quiet either. In August, new photos fueling fresh speculation about Noem and Corey Lewandowski, months after a lawmaker asked her point-blank in a congressional hearing whether the two had been intimate.
