Sen. Katie Britt’s cringey, dishonest State of the Union response was so bad, it was mocked by Scarlett Johansson in last night’s SNL cold open. But Fox News memory-holed the mockery and helped cover up her dishonesty, hypocrisy and disastrous performance. UPDATED: The sex trafficking victim has spoken out against Britt's remarks.
As I wrote yesterday for Crooks and Liars, Sen. Katie Britt’s laughably melodramatic “Mom in the kitchen” response to Biden’s fiery State of the Union address was so terrible, even Republicans torched it. Worse than that, she dissembled and misled. Then her anecdote clearly suggesting that a woman she met had been sex-trafficked at the border thanks to President Joe Biden’s policies, was totally debunked.
Fortunately for Britt, there’s a whole cable “news” network willing to pretend she put on a serious response to the State of the Union, help her deceitfully recast her sex-trafficking tale and pretend that Johansson’s hilarious send-up of her as “a wife, a mother and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot” never happened.
On today’s Fox News Sunday, Britt got a dose of gravitas right in anchor Shannon Bream’s opening. It began with a clip of Biden calling for Congress to send him a bipartisan national security bill to help Ukraine “stand up to Putin.” Then Bream teed up a partisan softball for Britt:
BREAM: So, you were among the 29 in the Senate who voted against advancing that package which is now kind of just sitting there stalled in the House. What do you make of the president's repeated accusations that you are helping Vladimir Putin if you do not support this package and that history is watching the mistakes he thinks you're making?
Notice that Bream didn’t ask why Britt voted against the package. No, Bream just wanted to know Britt’s (partisan) response to Biden.
Britt blathered about having “to do our job for the American people” and how frustrated she is about “not putting the needs of the American people front and center.” Then, instead of explaining what she thinks those needs are, she attacked Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer for taking 159 days to get an appropriations bill to President Biden, thus suggesting it's his fault that funding the government and “our border patrol agents” took so long to get funded.
What she was getting at, apparently, was that she plans to deal with appropriations first “and then we can take a look at what we need to do abroad.”
According to Britt, everything going wrong abroad is President Biden’s fault. She claimed Biden is enabling Putin and all other enemies: “I believe that an emboldened Russia is an emboldened China, is an emboldened Iran. And I believe we are seeing that wholeheartedly. So getting Ukraine lethal aid, lethal aid to protect themselves is critically important. Standing with our greatest ally, Israel, and making sure that they can actually defeat Hamas, not undermining them like President Biden continues to do.”
Bream did not push back in any way. She did not point out that Donald Trump, whom Britt has endorsed, has suggested he’d withdraw any support for Ukraine and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want.”
Instead, Bream changed the topic to Britt’s SOTU response. Bream euphemistically described it as having “gotten a lot of headlines. One of the fans was former President Trump. He loved it. He said it was compassionate and caring.”
Bream briefly noted that Britt “had a lot of critics out there.” She thoughtfully avoided mentioning Scarlett Johansson or Saturday Night Live.
Then she teed up Britt’s opportunity to spin her deceitful sex-trafficking story:
BREAM: And I want to talk about specifically one anecdote that I've heard you tell before. It is a horrific story of a sex trafficking survivor. Nobody is questioning that the story happened, that she is actually who she is, says she is and that this happened. The question is about the timing and the implication of you telling the story.
The New York Times has this: “None of this happened during President Biden's administration. But that didn't stop the first term Senator from strongly implying that the president could have somehow prevented it from happening, using rhetoric that seems calibrated to inflame public fears about immigration."
Did you mean to give the impression that this horrible story happened on President Biden's watch?
Come on, Shannon. I know you know that’s exactly what Britt intended. Here’s what she said in her State of the Union response:
When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.
The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end.
We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it.
Britt was allowed to dissemble and mislead again. First, she attacked President Biden for having “stopped all deportations” “minutes after coming into office” and promising “to give amnesty to millions.” Which, even if true, is really not relevant to her dishonest tale that suggested the woman had been raped at the border while Biden was president. (Spoiler alert: the woman was not raped at the border but in Mexico, while George W. Bush was president and Joe Biden was not yet vice president.)
Then Britt played the conservative victim: "The truth is -- and the media knows this, yet they're not covering it, that human trafficking has gone up under President Biden,” Britt whined. “And to me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that that is one of the things that the drug cartels are profiting most off of.”
Bream made a token gesture to get at the truth:
BREAM: OK. But to be clear, the story that you relate is not something that's happened under the Biden administration, that particular person?
Britt further dissembled:
BRITT: I'm -- well, I very -- I very clearly said, I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked, when she was 12. So, I didn't say a teenager, I didn't say a young woman, a grown woman, a woman when she was trafficked when she was 12. And so, listening to her story, she is a victim's rights advocate who -- who is telling this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they're profiting off of women. And it is disgusting. And so I am hopeful that it brings some light to -- to it. And we can actually do something about human trafficking. And that's what the media actually decides to cover.
Sorry, Senator, but it couldn’t have been clearer that you intended to suggest that this woman had been raped because of Biden’s policies at the border. And you knew you’d get a pass on your latest round of BS by spewing it on Fox News.
Sure enough, not only did Shannon Bream not challenge Britt’s disingenuousness, she failed to ask Britt why she voted against against the tough border bill she helped negotiate after Donald Trump told Republicans to nix it. Nor did Bream ask why, if Britt cares so much about sexual assault, she endorsed Trump. He was recently found civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and he can be heard plainly boasting on video about grabbing women by the p***y.
Instead, Britt got a chance to defend her widely-panned kitchen setting for her SOTU response, albeit from a very different setting this time, and to hold herself up as pro-woman, despite her support for a sexual predator:
BREAM: OK. I want to ask you about -- you have endorsed President Trump. He did that back in December. A lot of folks think the GOP put you out there this week because they need to connect with suburban women. It's a place where he's lacking and where they've had trouble.
CBS has a new polling out, their analysis says this, "The issues of abortion and the state of democracy helped boost Mr. Biden with women over Trump. Women who see these issues as major factors in their vote are backing him by more than two to one. Six in 10 women think overturning Roe v. Wade was bad for the country, nearly nine out of 10 favor IVF being legal."
So what do you say to those who say they -- you know, great that you're out there giving the speech? But they don't think Republicans in their daily policy decisions actually care about women and their lives?
BRITT: I think the exact opposite is true and that is exactly why I was sitting at a kitchen table. Republicans care about kitchen table issues. We care about faith, family, we care about freedom. We are the ones talking about the economy and the real effects of that while Joe Biden is claiming that Bidenomics is working. We know that gas is higher. We know that he's making us energy dependent on others, is not only hurting us at home, it's actually hurting our allies abroad.
We know that when we go to the grocery store that things cost more. I mean, we know that the credit card debt in this nation right now is at an all- time high, over a trillion dollars. It's the highest ever in our nation's history. We know when people are looking to buy a home for their family that mortgage rates are up. And so, we are talking about the issues that women care about.
I am proud to be pro-life and want to make sure that we have an opportunity to protect life. And that was why I was so proud of the Alabama legislature for making sure that women had access to IVF and had that confidence that they would continue, that these families would continue to have access because I believe that that is not only pro-life, but that is also pro-family.
Ms. Pro-Family didn’t indicate any concern that while she’s “so proud” of the Alabama legislature (which did not fully make sure women have access to IVF), her own party just blocked a bill in the U.S. Senate that would have provided federal protections for fertility treatments.
Bream didn’t ask about that, either.
You can watch Fox help Britt try to dig herself out of the PR hole she made for herself after the State of the Union below, from the March 10, 2024 Fox News Sunday.
Also below, for some Sunday night giggles, is Scarlett Johansson’s send-up, via Crooks and Liars.
3/11/24 UPDATE: The woman at the heart of Britt's sex-trafficking tale, Karla Jacinto Romero, added her own criticisms of Britt's SOTU response during a CNN interview yesterday.
From The Daily Beast:
Romero also told [CNN] that Sen. Britt got multiple elements of her story wrong. She was trafficked by a pimp who worked to force vulnerable girls into prostitution, Romero said, not Mexican drug cartels. She was also never trafficked inside the U.S.; while Britt did not explicitly say Romero had been trafficked in the U.S., some viewers may have got that impression from the senator’s phrase: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a Third World country; this is the United States of America.”
Romero’s captivity also took place between 2004-08, during President George W. Bush’s second term. Again, Britt did not specifically say when Romero had been trafficked, but presented her story in the context of the “disgrace” of Biden’s border policies. Lastly, Romero confirmed she met Britt at an event on the border that was attended by multiple other government officials and anti-human trafficking activists—a detail that Britt omitted, making their meeting sound like a more private, personal encounter.
“‘Someone using my story and distorting it for political purposes,’ she told me, ‘Is not fair at all,’” [CNN's Rafael] Romo said Romero told him.