By Ian Tuttle
Thursday, January 28, 2016
In April 2009, Katrina Pierson was a disappointed Obama
voter and, she emphasized, “just a mom,” when she made her first foray into
politics: a seven-minute speech at the Dallas Tea Party Tax Day Rally. “No
president is going to change your life circumstances,” she reminded the crowd.
“No government, no friends, no family, but most certainly no president is going
to change your life circumstances.”
How things change.
In November, Donald Trump handpicked Pierson, a Texas
tea-party activist, conservative pundit, and erstwhile Republican candidate for
Congress, to be his national spokesperson, assigning her a seemingly superhuman
task. In fact, it has proven an inspired choice. In Pierson, Trump found
someone whose relationship to conservatism, and to the truth, is as elastic as
his own.
Start with Pierson’s professional history. Ironically, it
was as a volunteer for Ted Cruz’s insurgent campaign for a Senate seat in Texas
that Pierson first found the national spotlight, becoming a regular guest on
cable news (including and especially Fox News). A review of appearances from
Pierson’s early political career reveals no particular trenchancy, but
certainly a dose of that inimitable and inborn quality: “media savvy.”
Perhaps that is what she brought to the Cruz campaign,
since the actual work she did remains a point of contention among the Cruz
faithful. An activist involved in both Cruz’s senatorial and presidential
campaigns told Politico, “My
8-year-old did more work for Ted than she ever thought about doing,” and Cruz
insiders added that the senator never considered bringing Pierson in on his
national efforts. (He did describe her as an “utterly fearless principled
conservative” when she launched an unsuccessful primary bid against Texas
congressman Pete Sessions in 2013.)
In any event, Pierson became a prominent Cruz supporter
and even appeared on stage with him the evening of his general-election
victory. And she continued to support Cruz long after Election Night: In
January 2015, Pierson introduced him at a tea-party event in South Carolina,
and in March she told Megyn Kelly that Cruz was “a walking testament to
immigrants who have fled their countries to seek freedom and achieved the
American dream.”
But since joining the Trump campaign, Pierson has been
eager to suggest that it is Cruz himself who is the immigrant. “There’s a ton
of voters who are a little uncomfortable voting for someone outside of the
country,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month, insinuating that
Cruz’s birth makes him ineligible for the presidency. Oddly, Pierson had no
such concerns when she was campaigning for him — or when, in March 2015, just
after Cruz’s presidential announcement and shortly after her comments on The Kelly File, she wrote on Facebook:
“Repeating your wishes as facts isn’t going to make them so. Ted Cruz is a
natural citizen by BIRTH and is eligible to be President,” adding: “For those
constantly citing otherwise is plain whiney and the most unintelligent way to
prop up your choice. So, your candidate is just going to have to bring it in
the debates. Good luck!”
Consistency is not Pierson’s strong suit. In December,
when South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy endorsed Marco Rubio for the White
House, Pierson tweeted: “FTR [For the record], Trey Gowdy lost all credibility
when he nominated John Boehner for Speaker so he’s perfect for Marco Rubio.”
But just two months earlier, the Tea Party Leadership Fund — a woefully
mismanaged PAC for whom Pierson was spokeswoman — was fundraising off efforts
to make Trey Gowdy speaker. She has since claimed that she merely “supported an
organization that supported Trey Gowdy.” And speaking of the speaker’s office:
Despite being a fierce critic of Paul Ryan’s, in 2012, the day after the
Romney-Ryan ticket lost, Pierson tweeted: “Paul Ryan for House Speaker!”
Perhaps Pierson’s inconsistencies (of which there are
many), and even outright lies (same), could be chalked up to campaign “spin.”
Being the mouthpiece for a politician is likely to require a certain
flexibility with the facts, and Donald Trump would require a Gumby-like
disposition. But Pierson’s excuses on Trump’s behalf come on top of dozens of
troubling statements of her own.
The attack on Cruz’s eligibility takes on a new dimension
in light of Pierson’s tweet from June 19, 2012: “Perfect Obama’s dad born in
Africa, Mitt Romney’s dad born in Mexico. Any pure breeds left?” Defending the
tweet, she told CNN’s Brian Stelter that “I myself am a half-breed.” Of course,
she was obviously referring in her tweet not to ethnicity, but to place of
birth, and suggesting that neither Obama nor Romney was “fully” American. As it
happens, Donald Trump is a “half-breed,” too: His mother was born in Scotland.
In 19th-century fashion, Pierson’s nativism includes a
bizarre streak of anti-Catholicism. “Just saw a commercial from Catholic Church
stating that Catholic Church was started by Jesus,” she tweeted in 2011: “I bet
they believe that too. #sad.” In early 2013, she lamented that Republicans
preferred “old white Catholic guys” as their messengers, naming, alongside John
Boehner, Mitt Romney (a Mormon) and Karl Rove (an Episcopalian). The origins of
this fixation are unclear, though a March 2012 blog post may offer a clue:
“Let’s not forget that the Catholic Church supported Obama and his health care
reform.”
Regarding Mormonism, what did Pierson mean in 2012 when
she tweeted: “#2012 Choice: Mormon or Jihadi? #clear enough?” or “I’ll vote
#Mormon over a #Jihadi!”
And about Muslims Pierson’s views are, unsurprisingly,
contradictory. “So what? They’re Muslim!” she told S.E. Cupp on CNN, defending
Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. Yet: “Malcolm X is my #freedomfighter hero!” she
tweeted in February 2013, calling Martin Luther King Jr. “too moderate.” A few
months earlier, she had called the militant black separatist her “idol.”
Malcolm X, of course, converted to Islam in his thirties, after breaking with
the Nation of Islam.
And there are gratuitous swipes at religion per se: “They can’t handle the truth,”
she wrote of Rick Santorum fans in January 2012, adding: “Most of the religious
types can’t.” One month later: “#RickSantorum as most religious people, Do as I
say not as I do.”
If Pierson’s theological musings are of little interest
to conservative voters, perhaps her thoughts on race will be. Long before
Donald Trump’s presidential run, it was Katrina Pierson who denounced
Republicans as racist: In 2012, Pierson retweeted a Twitter user who charged
that “The (GOP) is RACIST,” and added, “Hard to argue w/Rick Santroum [sic] up front.” Elsewhere she noted,
pointedly, that he had not received many “minority endorsements.” Meanwhile,
three years earlier, on her personal blog, she had declared: “I am also the last
person to play the race card.”
By the by, the candidate for whom Pierson is working this
election cycle recently retweeted Twitter user “@WhiteGenocideTM.”
If you deduced from the above that Pierson has no
particular criteria for what constitutes a conservative, you would be correct.
In 2012, she rejected Santorum as “the consummate Washington insider and party
man,” and threw her support behind . . . former speaker of the house Newt
Gingrich.
In a long post at her blog in February 2012, she
explained: “I respect a person whose difficult life experiences have molded
their character for the better. I respect a person who can own their mistakes
and be held accountable. I respect a person who is honest and respectful.” With
that, who could disagree?
Yet Pierson’s candidate this cycle has said that an
American POW held and tortured in Vietnam for five-and-a-half years was a war
hero only “because he was captured,” has mocked a disabled reporter, and has
made what many interpreted as a reference to a Fox News anchor’s menstrual
cycles — all since announcing his candidacy.
In the same post, Pierson warned against Mitt Romney this
way: “Jimmy Carter was a successful business man, and from what I’m told, he
did a number on the economy.”
Yet Pierson’s candidate this cycle has declared
bankruptcy four times; has to his discredit a failed airline, line of steaks,
steakhouse, board game, university, and three
magazines; and is largely responsible for the syringe-laden hellhole that is
Atlantic City, N.J.
Nonetheless, Pierson claims the right to arbitrate who
is, and is not, conservative.
This month, shortly after National Review released its
issue editorializing against Donald Trump’s White House bid, Pierson tweeted:
“Do ‘conservatives’ whom no one ever heard of before 2008 all of the sudden
think they own the place?” Among the conservatives who contributed to National
Review’s symposium were Stanford economist Thomas Sowell and RedState founder
Erick Erickson. Funnily enough, among people who had heard of Thomas Sowell and
Erick Erickson: Katrina Pierson. “Support for Newt,” she wrote in her Gingrich
endorsement, “has come from Michael Reagan, Sarah and Todd Palin, Thomas
Sowell, Fred Thompson, J. C. Watts, Chuck Norris, Michael Williams, and many
others who have had the guts to be on the front lines of this fight.” And
touting Ted Cruz’s Senate bid in July 2012, Pierson noted that his supporters
included “prominent conservatives” such as “Erick Erickson.”
To this one must add that NR’s symposium also included
contributions from former attorneys general Ed Meese and Michael Mukasey, and
commentator Bill Kristol, all of whom (along with Sowell) have been tilling the
soil of conservatism since, quite literally, before Pierson was born.
Donald Trump has been hailed as the standard-bearer of a
new right-wing politics. He, of course, isn’t. Trump is a calculator and
manipulator who struck upon conservative politics as the best available vehicle
to further facilitate his own self-aggrandizement. If a new right-wing politics
is making its debut, it is more accurately Katrina Pierson who is its voice.
The tea-party movement, for all its salutary effects,
always posed a particular danger: that, unmoored from a thoughtful and
substantive understanding of what ideas such as “limited government” and
“constitutional principles” actually mean in the conservative tradition, the
movement would mutate into an inchoate disgust with politics as such. That is what has happened to
Pierson. She is a true ideologue, someone who has been entirely consumed by a
particular fantasy — in this case, that a villainous, infinitely expansive
“Establishment” has systematically deceived voters in order to operate the
levers of power in Washington, D.C., on behalf of shadowy, moneyed forces (“the
donor class”). And so entrenched is this cabal that it cannot be reformed from
inside by debate; it must be obliterated from without, by force — not of weapons, but of will. “We are in a war for our
nation,” Pierson wrote in 2012. For her and so many others, Trump, by the force
of his personality, will wrest the country back from its crisis.
What this mutant tea-party wing is clamoring for is
grimly ironic: to reduce the size and scope of government by vesting power in a
single individual, a Caesar who will restore the republic. It long ago escaped
Pierson that the American constitutional order was erected precisely to prevent such a scheme.
In 2009, at that inaugural speech for the Dallas Tea
Party, Pierson applauded her audience for seeing through Obama’s messianic
façade: “Not all of us are hypnotized,” she said. “Not all of us have our heads
in the sand.”
A few short years later, many on the right seem to have
forgotten that false messiahs come in many forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment