Why Katie Britt Matters

She's Not New, Just More of the Same

Senator Katie Britt, Alabama. MAGA’s 21st Century Face

Delivering the rebuttal to the State of the Union is a thankless job. The President of the United States has an hour to lay out accomplishments, an agenda, and a path forward specifically designed to engage the most Americans on a variety of topics. Joe Biden did this very well on Thursday night.

Alabama Senator Katie Britt (R – Sub-Zero) did not.

Let’s talk about the performance itself for a minute. Like watching a car crash, it was horrific to see, yet impossible to look away. You saw it unfolding and time slowed down.

My inimitable Lincoln Project colleague Tara Setmayer and I were on the air while Britt was speaking. I wasn’t watching, but from the comments on the live stream we could see reports of the debacle.

Britt was in the driver’s seat during the crash. Like the moment after impact, it’s hard to understand the gravity of what’s just happened. The initial shock can shield you from understanding the damage.

In Britt’s case, that haze didn’t last long as social media and then the mainstream press reminded her that her political car was totaled, and she was lucky to have survived the event.

Recuperating from her crash-test dummy impression this weekend, the news broke that the story Britt related about a young woman being trafficked had not occurred during Biden’s administration, but during George W. Bush’s presidency, and in Mexico, not the US as Britt implied.

This is the political equivalent of the doctor coming to your hospital room to tell you you’ll survive your injuries, but you’re losing a leg. You’ll live, but you’ll never be the same.

Author’s Note: TikTokker Jonathan M. Katz’s video is a master class in how to actually research and report on a claim made by a politician. I encourage you to take the time to watch it.

This will be Britt’s (gold) cross to bear for years to come.

(Lengthy) aside:

Britt represents a long, unhealthy tradition of staffers running for their boss’s old seat. They come not with beliefs but an ingrained sense of how to “play the game.” She was an aide and then chief of staff for retired Alabama Senator Richard Shelby.

This is not new in American (or human) history, but that doesn’t make it better. It allows someone like Britt to achieve an incredible amount of power and prestige powered not by belief and conviction, but timing, fundraising, and connections. They now sit on the other side of the desk, and along with their staff and bevy of consultants, triangulate every issue, every vote, and every press release based on what’s best for their career. She represents not the people of Alabama, but her own ambition.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Pollyanna, though I do harbor healthy idealism. After all, I’m a politico’s kid. I grew up at the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican National Committee, and the US Capitol. I understand the motivations of capital cities are less “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and far more “Veep.” (Reminder, most people in DC are Jonah.)

End aside.

The reason Senator Britt was so bad on camera is directly related to her path to high office. The speech was written for her, at the behest (and maybe the keyboard) of Donald Trump’s campaign. She had to deliver a collection of hyperbole, hysterics, and as it turns out, lies.

Why did she come across so badly?  Because the camera reveals all, and it was clear as day she didn’t believe a word of what she was saying. You see, Katie Britt is, all things considered, normal, for now.

The weird voice inflections, histrionics, and bullshit complaining were the result of the MAGA parasite come alive in a host not yet prepared to handle a full take over. Britt knew what was required of her but was constitutionally unable to pull it off.

She’s an untrained Elise Stefanik. She’s not a true believer like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. Greene pointed out Britt’s lack of fealty in a video interview with Puck’s Tara Palmeri.

Speaking of the MAGA Coven, no one was more gleeful to watch Katie Britt flop around her designer kitchen like Whole Foods farm-raised salmon than the people hoping they get that special call from Donald Trump asking them to join his ticket. Imagine wanting to take a job where the last occupant was almost hanged on orders of your boss.

This is a good time to remind everyone: The only people MAGA hate more than you and me are each other. This isn’t unique to Trump’s criminal and political organizations. Authoritarian movements are typically riven with the outcasts, weirdos, and sociopaths of society. They’re all in it for themselves and will do anything to climb over one another.

Back to Senator Britt.

Katie Britt will be fine, of course. By the time she’s up for reelection in 2028, she’ll have washed herself in the blood of MAGA both as a defense mechanism (against a primary challenge) and because this experience will cause her to move toward the darkness and insanity, the only direction modern Republicans move. She will turn her anger and indignation not on the men who led her to this place, but to those that called her out for her mendacity and unreadiness for prime time.

What we learned about Senator Katie Britt this week is what we already knew about Trump’s GOP. She’s an empty vessel, filled not with conviction, but the willingness to say and do anything to move forward an authoritarian ideology. Like her Senate colleague Tim Scott (R – Indignity) she’s now learned that ritual humiliation is part and parcel of being part of MAGA.

Tommy Tuberville, the other (clownish) senator from Alabama, said on national television that the only reason Britt was chosen was to impart the image of women in the home (where they belong, of course.) If she’s objected publicly to this insulation, I haven’t seen it. That’s all we need to know.

In another time and place, Katie Britt could have been the ‘new face and generation’ of the Republican Party. Now, she is one more politician who’s sold out whatever political conviction and soul she had for a man who, from the bridal suite at Mar-A-Lago, is brutally ridiculing her.