Was Katie Britt's tortured SOTU speech a lame, Trump-inspired attempt to peddle "The Great Replacement Theory" to race-obsesed MAGA voters?

Katie Britt and husband Wesley Britt

 

About the only person who has praised Katie Britt's Republican response to the State of the Union address is Donald Trump, the GOP's presumptive candidate for president in 2024 -- and news of Trump's positive review comes amid reports that Britt, U.S. Senator from Alabama, was on his "short list" for a running mate. Does that mean Trump and his allies had heavy input into the content of Britt's fact-challenged and widely panned speech?  Does that mean Britt was happy to deliver a deeply flawed speech -- some journalists have said it contained out-and-out lies -- because she held hopes of becoming vice president, although she appears to have zero qualifications for such a lofty role?

These questions come to mind after reading an op-ed piece by Dean Obeidallah, a former lawyer, frequent CNN contributor, and host of his eponymous daily show at SiriusXM radio. 

Under the headline "Katie Britt’s outrageous statements about migrants," Obeidallah writes:

Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama delivered the GOP response last week to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, and America has been ruthlessly delivering its response to Britt ever since.

Social media exploded with brutal reviews of Thursday’s speech, mocking everything from Britt’s “acting class energy” to her decision to deliver the address from her kitchen (suggesting, perhaps, that some in the GOP think that’s where women belong), as well as her breathless delivery. 

Saturday Night Live piled on this weekend, with Scarlett Johansson making a surprise appearance portraying the senator in the show’s opening sketch, overperforming every line including “tonight I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom” and “I’ll be performing an original monologue called ‘this country is hell’.”

While the SNL parody was a hit, Britt's actual speech was a colossal flop, except in the opinion of one person. Obeidallah writes:

At least one person truly loved Britt’s speech: Former President Donald Trump praised Britt for delivering what he called a “GREAT” speech that was “compassionate and caring.” His accolades should not come as a surprise. After all, Britt took a page from his playbook by baselessly ratcheting up fears about an influx of migrants to scare voters into supporting the GOP.

In her address, Britt blamed Biden for the “border crisis,” claiming he “invited” it with his executive actions. During the speech, she told the harrowing story of a woman she said she’d met on the Texas side of the southern border who told her about having been “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12.” 

“She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped,” Britt said. After sharing additional details of the woman’s story, the senator declared, “We wouldn’t be OK 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 added, “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

The content of Britt's speech involved a slight problem. A substantial portion of it was false. Even Karla Jacinto Romero, the victim of the dreadful abuse Britt describes, has blasted the senator's speech -- and the way Britt went about concocting a fact-challenged version of what really happened. Obeidallah writes:

The senator’s words might have led some listeners to conclude that Biden’s border policies resulted in this child being sex trafficked beginning at the age of 12. However, that was not even close to the truth.

As fact checkers detailed — and Britt’s own staff admitted after strong pushback by critics of the speech — this sex trafficking did not happen during Biden’s presidency. And contrary to what Britt seemed to imply, the vile abuse didn’t occur on US soil. It took place in Mexico.

“SNL” mocked the speech and its speaker, with Johansson-as-Britt declaring, “I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.” She quickly added, to big laughs, “Rest assured, every detail about it is real … except the year, where it took place and who was president when it happened.”

Sean Ross, Britt's spokesman, did not do her any favors. He seems as averse to facts as she is. Ross once was a writer and editor at Yellowhammer News, which is more or less an in-house right-wing rag of Alabama Power and its parent firm, Atlanta-based Southern Company -- both of which have been embroiled in the North Birmingham Bribery scandal for 10 years or so. Alabama Power also used to be the employer of Wesley Britt, Katie's husband and a former offensive lineman for the University of Alabama and the NFL's New England Patriots. Obeidallah writes:

Amid the uproar over the story’s accuracy, Britt’s spokesperson defended it as “100% correct,” but conceded that the individual at the center of the account was Karla Jacinto Romero, who testified to Congress years ago about having been forced by traffickers to work in Mexican brothels between 2004 and 2008 — during the George W. Bush administration.

Britt’s border narrative was grossly misleading, but exaggerated stories designed to gin up fears of non-white migrants are exactly what Trump has been delivering from the day he descended the gilded elevator in Trump Tower and kicked off his 2016 presidential run. Trump launched that campaign by falsely telling voters that Mexico was sending people to the United States who were “bringing crime” and were “rapists.” Britt’s story conjures up the very same theme — one that the former president and his supporters have returned to repeatedly since his election.

In other words, Britt did with her speech what Trump has been doing for years -- telling scary stories about brown people, perhaps designed to attract right-wing voters who, perhaps driven by the GOP-promoted "The Great Replacement Theory," want to see more white faces and fewer brown faces in America. An academic study, by the way, has shown that The Great Replacement Theory was a driving force for rioters at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Writes Obeidallah:

During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, Trump and the Republican establishment put out a message that “caravans” filled with “thugs” and bringing “crime” were heading to the United States. After the election, however, when voters rejected the GOP scare tactics and flipped control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, the GOP suddenly became suspiciously quiet about migrant “caravans.”

Despite that election loss, scaring people about immigrants is still a major part of Trump’s playbook. In December, he invoked the dangerous language of Adolph Hitler, claiming that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. (Trump has said he was unaware that the quote had been uttered by Hitler.) Last month, while visiting the southern border, Trump lied that jails “throughout the world” were being emptied so that former inmates could migrate to the US. 

And just last week, after the Super Tuesday primaries, Trump claimed, “Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime.” The data does not support the assertion that migrants are responsible for higher rates of crime — quite the contrary, in fact. But facts don’t seem to matter when you are trying to scare voters.

The Republican Party was not always associated with racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. GOP President Ronald Reagan in 1989 declared that immigrants were making our “nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas.” The 40th US President added, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

But that GOP is dead. It’s now the party of Trump. That’s why Britt’s misleading statements about crime and migrants are applauded by Trump. So, laugh at Britt as much as you want. As long as she stokes fear about migrants, she will be beloved by Trump and the MAGA base.