The Bulwark’s Will Sommer took a deep dive on Monday into how the Trump administration tried to feed information to a trusted MAGA influencer — and her paranoia of “entrapment” set off a “circular firing squad” within the pro-Trump movement.
The controversy surrounds Jennica Pounds, better known as “Data Republican.”
The way Pounds described it, wrote Sommer, State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers “had offered to leak her government documents about Cuba to publish as an ‘exclusive.’ While Pounds was initially enthusiastic, markings on the documents prompted her to panic that she was being set up. Had she published the documents, Pounds felt, she would’ve exposed herself to criminal prosecution. She took the news of her supposed entrapment directly to her audience.”
Ultimately, Rogers disputed this, saying the markings would be present even on unclassified documents, and the whole idea that Pounds, who was later revealed to be an administration employee, would be entrapped made no sense — but it was too late, and MAGA conspiracy world ran wild and started pointing fingers at one another.
“While this drama is delicious on its own merits, it highlights a real problem facing the Trump administration: a lack of talented media figures who can handle even the basic function of laundering the administration’s message,” noted Sommer.
In the past, they at least had trained journalists sympathetic to their cause like John Solomon being used for that purpose, wrote Sommer, but “the problem is, there aren’t that many people in MAGA world suited to that task. Solomon is busy digging up documents of his own at the White House. Most of right-wing media is neck-deep in the influence and takes industry. The Trump administration doesn’t trust the more legacy-minded outlets. Which leaves folks like ‘Data Republican’ who have big online followings but are regarded skeptically (if known at all) outside that universe.”
At the end of the day, concluded Sommer, “Pounds’s bumbling drew a sigh from conservative commentators who have yearned since the days of Andrew Breitbart for a more professional Republican journalistic class.”
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