When Trump named Texas tea partier Katrina Pierson his national spokesperson in November, it was a match made in hellven. In just two months on the job, Pierson, 39, has racked up nearly as many offensive statements as her unfiltered boss. The two share a love of tweeting and a contempt for all things they deem, “politically correct,” meaning taste or sensitivity. “So what, they’re Muslim,” she said, when asked about Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from the country.
Pierson’s most recent act of provocation was wearing a necklace of bullets for a CNN interview, to show her love and support for the NRA. When she was criticized, she said she’d wear a necklace of fetuses next time, to bring “awareness to 50 million aborted people that will never [get] to be on Twitter.” She did not stop there, adding “the liberals freaking out about my accessories are sexist. They only approve of women in pantsuits and jackets. Oh, and tampon earrings.” That last bit was a reference to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s unusual accessories in a July 2013 broadcast.
Pierson and her boss share something else (apart from their mutual hatred of immigrants): a complete lack of concern about consistency or avoiding hypocrisy. Here are some fun, lesser-known, not entirely consistent facts from Pierson’s bio.
1. Pierson was born to a 15-year-old mother in Kansas and raised with the help of welfare, the sort of government program she now vehemently opposes. Like her mother, she had a baby at a young age and sometimes availed herself of government assistance, although she repudiates her mothers "redistribution of wealth" attitudes.
2. She has a 1997 arrest for shoplifting (when she was 20). She was accused of stealing $168 worth of clothing from a J.C. Penney. She has since woven this episode into her story of pulling herself up by her own (stolen?) bootstraps.
3. She has said she got active in politics as a result of 9/11. I thought, “These things don’t happen in our country, so what’s going on?”
4. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because she thought, “It was pretty awesome for our country that Barack Obama was a black guy running for that office.” (Pierson’s biological mother was white and her father was black.) But she soon became disenchanted with Obama when she realized, “Everything that he stood for was in complete opposition to what I felt.” What set her off was Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin. She also disliked his whole “socialized” medicine thing.
5. She did not turn toward the Republican Party, because she did not much like John McCain. But she did kind of like Sarah Palin, who seemed “more normal” to her. She has said that when she went to her first Tea Party meeting, she felt like she found “her people.” She especially liked their stance against government spending on social programs.