Donald Trump has long had a strange thing with dogs. In August of last year, the Cut pointed out that Trump invokes dogs when speaking of a person getting fired—as in “old so-and-so got fired like a dog!”—which happens often in his administration. But the dog simile is not just limited to dismissals. To the president, dogs are capable of many things, none of which are especially doglike. Begging for money, for example. Getting dumped. Feeling ungrateful. Being “thrown off.”

Trump never compared anything to a dog in a way that draws on how the animal famously is. It’s never, “He’s loyal like a dog.” There’s no, “He dug a hole and hid a bone like a dog.” And even if we suspend disbelief about what dogs are and are not capable of, the creatures have never done much good in the Trumpian universe. No one gets a raise and a title change “like a dog.” No one wins the lottery “like a dog.” No, in Trump‘s universe, dogs are hapless laborers, one bark away from losing their salaried position and their wife.

Every time he says this kind of stuff, one wonders whether he knows what a dog is exactly. There’s more evidence. You know, a person usually hates what they don’t understand, and Trump appears to hate dogs. While he was hosting The Apprentice, Trump fired Gary Busey after Busey had invented something called a “mechanical dog.” As Slate recently pointed out, Trump’s ex-wife Ivana wrote in her memoir about how much he hated her poodle Chappy, and Chappy hated Donald. He’s the only president in the last century who hasn’t kept a dog as a pet in the White House. The hate, obviously, is born of not quite getting what these dog things are.

But something happened recently that suggests some progress on the Trump-knowing-what-a-dog-is front. On October 27, the president appeared before the world to boast about the armed force’s successful mission to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (a mission that he almost disrupted). At first in his speech, it was more of the usual. “He died like a dog,” Trump said of the terrorist, and then, as if to clarify what he meant by that, the president added, “He died like a coward.”

Then he mentioned that an actual dog was, in part, responsible for the death of al-Baghdadi—a Belgian Malinois named Conan. After Conan cornered al-Baghdadi in a tunnel, the terrorist detonated a suicide vest that killed al-Baghdadi and injured the dog. Today, Trump tweeted a meme made by the conservative site the Daily Wire, a photoshopped image that depicts the president putting a medal around Conan.

He captioned it, “AMERICAN HERO!“ Wow. Trump likes a dog. That’s a huge step. It’s a massive leap. What happened between al-Baghdadi dying “like a dog” and this tweet?


I posit that, with the help of Conan, the president finally grasped what a dog was, and with that knew understanding learned to love one. He “got” dogs suddenly, and what they do with their time on this fecund little planet. And so, we return to that speech he gave for the evidence, and find this: “Our K-9, as they call—I call it a dog, a beautiful dog, a talented dog—was injured and brought back,” he said.

“I call it a dog. A beautiful dog. A talented dog.”

“I call it a dog.”

It would seem Donald Trump learned what a dog is. Amazing.

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