When Trump named Texas tea partier Katrina Pierson his national spokesperson in November, it was a match made in hellven. In just two months on the job, Pierson, 39, has racked up nearly as many offensive statements as her unfiltered boss. The two share a love of tweeting and a contempt for all things they deem, “politically correct,” meaning taste or sensitivity. “So what, they’re Muslim,” she said, when asked about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from the country.
Pierson’s most recent act of provocation was wearing a necklace of bullets for a CNN interview, to show her love and support for the NRA. When she was criticized, she said she’d wear a necklace of fetuses next time, to bring “awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never [get] to be on Twitter.” She did not stop there, adding “the liberals freaking out about my accessories are sexist. They only approve of women in pantsuits and jackets. Oh, and tampon earrings.” That last bit was a reference to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s unusual accessories in a July 2013 broadcast.
Pierson and her boss share something else (apart from their mutual hatred of immigrants): a complete lack of concern about consistency or avoiding hypocrisy. Here are some fun, lesser-known, not entirely consistent facts from Pierson’s bio.
1. Pierson was born to a 15-year-old mother in Kansas and raised with the help of welfare, the sort of government program she now vehemently opposes. Like her mother, she had a baby at a young age and sometimes availed herself of government assistance, although she repudiates her mothers "redistribution of wealth" attitudes.
2. She has a 1997 arrest for shoplifting (when she was 20). She was accused of stealing $168 worth of clothing from a J.C. Penney. She has since woven this episode into her story of pulling herself up by her own (stolen?) bootstraps.
3. She has said she got active in politics as a result of 9/11. I thought, “These things don’t happen in our country, so what’s going on?”
4. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because she thought, “It was pretty awesome for our country that Barack Obama was a black guy running for that office.” (Pierson’s biological mother was white and her father was black.) But she soon became disenchanted with Obama when she realized, “Everything that he stood for was in complete opposition to what I felt.” What set her off was Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin. She also disliked his whole “socialized” medicine thing.
5. She did not turn toward the Republican Party, because she did not much like John McCain. But she did kind of like Sarah Palin, who seemed “more normal” to her. She has said that when she went to her first Tea Party meeting, she felt like she found “her people.” She especially liked their stance against government spending on social programs.
6. The avid anti-government program tea partier received unemployment benefits while working for Ted Cruz’s 2012 senate campaign.
7. Last year, she mounted a primary challenge against Texas Rep. Pete Sessions. She was trounced. Former boss Ted Cruz’s support was tepid, but his father, right-wing evangelical preacher Rafael Cruz, backed her. “I love him,” Pierson said at the time. “He is the same as Ted to me.”
8. After Pierson lost the primary, she took a job as a spokesperson for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which Politico reports, “has been described in media reports as a 'scam PAC' for tactics that include spending unusually high percentages of its funding on overhead. ‘We all have to pay the bills, but for Katrina, there is no principle that she isn’t willing to abandon for the right price,’ complained Matt Mackowiak, an unaligned Republican consultant from Texas.”
9. She bailed on Ted Cruz when she became smitten with Trump’s anti-immigration message. She met Trump face-to-face at several conservative events, such as Rep. Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines and later at CPAC. She shares his views on Islam, writing on Facebook, "Islam preys on the weak and uses political correctness as cover. Two things that Americans won’t be concerned with when @realDonaldTrump is in the White House.” One area where she might be more extreme than her boss is nuclear weapons: “What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” she remarked after Donald Trump botched a debate question about nuclear armaments.
10. Another reason she decided to go to work for Trump, who is less conservative than she generally prefers her politicians to be, is that she was a little starstruck: “When Donald says, ‘I think you’re great, I really want you to work for me,’ I don’t think any sane person would say no to that,” she told Politico.
11. She shares Trump’s entrepreneurial bent and plans to launch her own clothing line, although she apparently has not pitched her business to Ivanka Trump, who heads her own fashion line. In fact, Pierson thinks the Donald's branding brilliance is just what the world needs, telling the Dallas Morning News, “Mr. Trump is definitely someone that has an international economic appeal. He’s built a billion-dollar empire. He’s grown businesses. He’s had successes and failures. He’s learned the tricks of the trade. He’s a great negotiator. He’s known for building brands, and that’s what the country needs right now.” No word on whether Pierson's clothing line would also accessories, like bullet and fetus necklaces (together in one necklace, ideally!)
12. She views Trump as a stepping stone, a transitional figure, to an even more conservative president. Maybe Ted Cruz, if he’ll have her back. She told Politico, “Cruz would be a good president, but I think right now with all the hyper-partisanship in the country, I think Trump would be the better person to transition out of Obama,” she said. “It would be a softer transition for some on the left. It would be a harder transition for some on the right.”
Shares