Sen. Katie Britt with her husband, Wesley, daughter, Bennett, and son, Ridgeway.
By John Archibald | jarchibald@al.com
This is an opinion column.
Katie Britt’s kitchen was empty. Her table was bare.
There was nothing to see but her. And she was – they told us – ready for her closeup.
Come on in, America. Meet your future, and see just how normal it looks.
None of this Tommy Tuberville stuff, with the casual racism or the flip-flopping or the hopeless ignorance about the three branches of government.
This was Katie Britt, Alabama’s Great Slight Hope. This was Katie freakin’ Britt, the second coming of Dick Shelby, who could keep his dignity, and hold on to most of himself while maintaining his conservative values, bringing home pork by the barrelful and appeasing the red meat Republican crowd and the Business Council of Alabama to boot.
Katie freakin’ Britt, the one they said was different. The one they said could show this whole country that young, educated GOP women were still a thing. They said she could demonstrate that Republicans could still be civil and dignified and respected, that they didn’t have to be performative clowns in MAGA hats, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Katie Britt was the answer.
All eyes were on her Thursday night as she stepped onto a vast stage from that unnaturally empty kitchen to respond to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. The country was watching as she began to read her predictable script, to audition for the role of her lifetime.
America was looking for proof of normalcy.
And it got “The Three Faces of Eve.”
Which is sort of appropriate, I suppose, since Britt has had to use a slew of personalities to pretend to be everything to everyone in her own state’s GOP.
Like always, you become who you pretend to be. And Katie Britt was everybody but the person people claim she is.
What was the part she was trying out for again?
One who could restore faith in the reason and reasonability of the future Republican Party?
Some said the real audition was for the vice presidency of the United States, a shot at being second in command to Donald Trump himself, an old man’s heartbeat away from becoming the leader of the free world, should it all go down as some polls predict.
All she had to do was read her script on a teleprompter, catch the bouquet, take her bow and take her place as a politician to be both respected and reckoned with.
And then…
She was Faye Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest” shrieking “No wire hangers!
She was Nicolas Cage in anything. She was William Shatner in “The Wrath of Katie.” She was over-the-top and anything and everything but reasonable.
She wasn’t trying out for VP. She was trying out for the cold open of “Saturday Night Live.” As the punchline and the punching bag.
Katie Britt was supposed to be the smart one, the reasonable one, the regular one.
She was supposed to be the one who would make Alabamians proud — or less embarrassed than they too often are.
Unfortunately, she will be remembered another way.
As a joke.
Which is too bad. Because she seems to come off pretty well when she only pretends to be herself.
John Archibald is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Handmaiden Katie Britt, by JD Crowe.JD
'Explain the falsehoods': Pete Buttigieg flattens Katie Britt for misleading border story
March 10, 2024
ABC/screen grab
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called on Rep. Katie Britt (R-AL) to explain herself after repeating a misleading story about sex trafficking by immigrants.
In her response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, Britt told a decades-old story about a woman's sexual abuse that happened under George W. Bush's administration.
"In her speech, Britt also falsely implied that the violence encountered by a sex trafficking victim she met with was the fault of Biden administration policies," ABC host George Stephanopoulos told Buttigieg on Sunday. "That's not stopping the senator from standing by the story."
"I will leave it to her to explain the falsehoods, but I think it illustrates the bigger issue," Buttigieg replied. "She's a United States senator, and the United States Senate right now could be acting to help secure the southern border."
The Biden official used Britt's story to make a point.
"And you mentioned that this story that was suggested to be a reflection on President Biden turns out to have dated from the Bush administration and happened in a different country," he explained. "One thing that gets me thinking about is, since the beginning of the Bush administration, there have been three major bipartisan attempts to have comprehensive immigration reform or do something big and meaningful about the border, I think 2006, 2013, and now 2024."
"Will 2024 go down in history as yet another failed attempt at bipartisan compromise, or will congressional Republicans follow the lead of their own negotiators and the president of the United States and actually do something about it?" he added.
Watch the video below from ABC or at the link.
Katie Britt’s false linkage of a sex-trafficking case to Joe Biden
— Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.), in the Republican response to the State of the Union address, March 7
This article has been updated with a comment from the trafficking victim, whose name has also been updated to reflect her preference.
If you were watching Britt’s speech on Thursday night, you likely would have thought she was talking about a recent victim of sex trafficking who was abused in the United States and suffered because of President Biden’s policies.
If you did, you would have been wrong. Sean Ross, Britt’s communications director, confirmed that she was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero — who has testified before Congress about being forced to work in Mexican brothels from 2004 to 2008. (A viral TikTok by journalist Jonathan Katz first revealed that Britt was speaking about Jacinto.) In a phone conversation and a statement, Ross disputed that Britt’s language was misleading.
We disagree. Let’s take a look.
The Facts
Britt’s account of Jacinto’s experience was a centerpiece of her rebuttal to Biden’s address. The way Britt sets up the story, there is no indication that she is talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. This is how the passage unfolds.
- She first blames Biden for the surge of migrants at the border.
- Then she says she visited the border shortly after she took office. That would be 2023.
- At length, she details the story of an unnamed victim that she says she met on her trip. The implication is that the woman recently crossed the border — because of “sex trafficking by the cartels.”
- She strongly suggests that her abuse took place in the United States: “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
- She ends by reinforcing that such alleged trafficking is Biden’s fault: “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
But Biden has nothing to do with Jacinto’s story. As she testified nine years ago, her mother threw her out of her house at age 12 and she “fell prey to a professional pimp.” She says she then spent the next four years in brothels before a regular client helped her escape when she was 16 years old. There is no indication in her story that drug cartels were involved, though Britt said that in the State of the Union response and has made a similar claim on at least one other occasion. Jacinto was never trafficked to the United States; instead, she says many men who paid to have sex with her were “foreigners visiting my city [Guadalajara] looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”
In a YouTube video, Britt features images of her hugging Jacinto during her 2023 trip to the border. “If we as leaders of the greatest nation in the world are not fighting to protect the most vulnerable, we are not doing our job,” she said in the video. The implication again is that this happened on Biden’s watch.
When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.
Ross, Britt’s spokesman, said that Jacinto’s story was indicative of trafficking that is now happening at the border and that should be clear from Britt’s framing in the speech.
He said the reference to a “Third World country” was generic and was not intended to refer to Mexico, which he said is not a Third World country. Third World is a dated Cold War-era term previously used to refer to poor or developing countries. Global South, indicating low income and high poverty, is a more common expression today. Mexico is considered part of the Global South, though it is also a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In a written statement, Ross said:
- “The story Senator Britt told was 100% correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the President falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border. Along that journey, children, women, and men are being subjected to gut-wrenching, heartbreaking horrors in our own backyard. And here at home, the Biden administration’s policies are leading to more and more suffering, including Americans being poisoned by fentanyl and being murdered. These human costs are real, and it’s past time for some on the left to stop pretending otherwise.”
Update, March 11: In an interview with CNN, Jacinto criticized Britt for using her story in a misleading way. “I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo — and that to me is not fair,” she said. She said she was not trafficked by Mexican drug cartels into the United States but instead, as she had testified to Congress, was lured in the Mexican sex trade by a pimp.
The Pinocchio Test
In a high-profile speech like this, a politician should not mislead voters with emotionally charged language. Jacinto’s story is tragic and may be evocative of other Mexican girls trapped in the sex trade in that country. But she was not trafficked across the border — and her story has nothing to do with Biden. Britt’s failure to make that clear earns her Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
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