“Islam preys on the weak and uses political correctness as cover,” she wrote on Facebook. “Two things that Americans won’t be concerned with when @realDonaldTrump is in the White House.”
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If Trump is to maintain both his dominance on the airwaves and the support of hard-core tea partyers, it will be with the help of Katrina Pierson, who speaks the language of the party’s grass-roots activists with more fluency and even less regard for the normal bounds of political discourse than her new boss.
To the Trump campaign, the newly hired Pierson — a onetime Cruz loyalist who stood with the Texas senator onstage the night of his election in 2012 — brings a tough-talking conservative message delivered with a Texas twang and a polished presence on camera and social media.
Her addition last week indicates Trump’s resolve to keep the party’s activist base in his camp and away from the Texas senator, whom many see as the natural heir to Trump’s anti-establishment supporters should the mogul’s candidacy fade.
People who know Pierson, a media-savvy former Democrat with plans of launching her own fashion line, describe her as a much better fit for Trump than for Cruz.
Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said the senator “considers Katrina a friend [and] will always be grateful for her dedication and hard work to get him elected.” But other allies of the Texas senator painted a picture of an activist more interested in self-promotion than in the unglamorous work of political organizing and said there was no clamor from Cruz’s camp to bring her on board his presidential run.
“My 8-year-old did more work for Ted than she ever thought about doing,” said one activist who has organized on behalf of both Cruz’s Senate run and his presidential campaign.
Pierson — who rose to local political prominence as a Dallas tea party activist working on behalf of Cruz’s 2012 campaign — dismissed such criticism as “sour grapes.” But she agreed that Trump suits her better. “This is a nontraditional campaign,” she said. “I can be a little bit more who I am. That’s what I mean when I say it’s like a perfect fit.”
Of Trump, she said, “He’s sort of not politically correct. He sort of calls it like he sees it. I’m kind of that way, too.” Pierson, a frequent guest on cable news, said that as a Trump staffer she will continue to do what she has been doing for the past several months for free: touting the businessman’s message on television and social media.
“She is definitely very good at building her brand; she likes to be out there commenting on things,” said a Texas Republican familiar with Cruz world. “It’s a great opportunity for her.”
Tom O’Halloran, a Texas radio host and self-described “gun-carrying, radical, right-wing super villain,” said the hire is a win-win. “It’s certainly a step up from the arena she’s in,” he said, adding that the 39-year-old activist can expand the appeal of Trump’s message. “It provides them with a younger crowd.”
It also helps that Pierson shares Trump’s entrepreneurial bent, with plans in the works to launch her own shoe and clothing lines. Pierson said she has not discussed those plans, which remain in the conceptualization and design stages, with Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who presides over fashion lines of her own.
Last week, the Trump campaign announced Pierson’s hiring as its national spokeswoman, a move that caught some Cruz allies in Texas off-guard.
“I’m absolutely surprised she went to work for Trump because he’s not a conservative,” wrote Texas state Sen. Konni Burton in an email, stressing that she hoped everyone would work together in support of the eventual nominee. Along with Pierson, Burton was an early and active supporter of Cruz’s 2012 Senate bid, and she was one of the few candidates running in 2014 to secure Cruz’s endorsement in a Republican primary.
(“Konni of all people should know that my work in the grass roots is first and foremost defeating the establishment, and I need no one’s approval for that,” Pierson responded.)
Others were less surprised. They recounted Pierson’s behavior on election night in 2012, when she shifted around at the back of a crowded stage and stood on tiptoe as cameras flashed and Cruz delivered his victory speech at the front. At one point, Pierson found herself pinned behind Cruz’s 6½-foot-tall best friend, David Panton, a predicament she later complained about to Panton at Cruz’s swearing-in.
Two Cruz allies characterized Pierson’s jockeying as an attempt to get her face on camera. Pierson said it was the opposite: She was attempting to take better shots of the scene on a cellphone camera of her own.
Either way, after Cruz’s election, Pierson did not find a place in his inner circle and instead busied herself with her own, ill-fated congressional run — before finding her way into Trump’s less-crowded political orbit.
When she mounted a primary challenge to Texas Rep. Pete Sessions last year, it came out that she had received federal unemployment benefits while assisting Cruz’s run. A 1997 arrest for shoplifting also surfaced. Pierson, who was 20 at the time of the arrest, fit it into a narrative of pulling herself up by her bootstraps.
Born to a 15-year-old mother, Pierson grew up on welfare and gave birth to a child of her own at a young age, raising him as a single mother after her short-lived marriage to the boy’s father ended in divorce. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 2006 and voted for Barack Obama in 2008. But, beginning with Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag pin on his lapel, Pierson began to take issue with him and threw herself instead into Texas tea party activities, which led her to Cruz’s campaign and her own challenge to Sessions.
The appeal of that life story proved insufficient to knock off Sessions, who cruised to an easy victory in March 2014.
A Sessions campaign aide described Cruz’s support for Pierson in the primary as “half-assed.” While Cruz’s father, Rafael, endorsed Pierson, the senator stopped short of doing so, though he did offer praise. Pierson said she did not seek Cruz’s endorsement. “Rafael was good enough,” she said. “I love him. He is the same as Ted to me.”
After Pierson lost her primary challenge, she took a job as a spokeswoman for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which has been described in media reports as a “scam PAC” for tactics that include spending unusually high percentages of its funding on overhead. “We all have to pay the bills, but for Katrina, there is no principle that she isn’t willing to abandon for the right price,” complained Matt Mackowiak, an unaligned Republican consultant from Texas.
“What price is that?” responded Pierson. “Is there a price we can talk about, because I have worked my ass off at the grass roots since 2009 for zero dollars. It wasn’t until I started working for the PAC that I was being paid for my time.” One Cruz ally, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating Pierson, pointed to her work for the PAC as the sort of affiliation that would make her unappealing to the senator’s campaign.
As for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, Pierson said that new PACs have to dedicate extra money to overhead to get started. Of its critics, she said, “They just don’t understand what it stands for so they’re going to criticize it.”
Pierson’s slow-motion defection from Cruz to Trump began this year. In January, she went with Cruz to a Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, tea party gathering, at which she introduced the Texas senator to her fellow activists. But while there, she also took a liking to the New York real estate developer and his tough talk on immigration, her top priority. Pierson told Trump she would like to pitch in if he mounted a presidential run. “I knew he would give Jeb Bush a run for his money,” she said.
After meeting Trump in Myrtle Beach, Pierson ran into him again later that month in the VIP room at Rep. Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines. Trump was enthused to see Pierson, according to a person present, and invited her down to Palm Beach to visit his private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Pierson ran into Trump’s aides the next month at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. But in March, she made a photo of herself conferring with Cruz at a 2014 awards banquet hosted by Texans for Fiscal Responsibility her Facebook profile picture.
Pierson, who has praised Trump — especially for his hard-line immigration stance — in countless cable news appearances this year, raised eyebrows in Texas and among tea party activists in September when she publicly aligned herself with him. Introducing the businessman at a campaign rally at American Airlines Center in Dallas, Pierson called the Trump phenomenon a “revolution” and encouraged him to tear up his just-signed GOP loyalty pledge, stopping just shy of formally endorsing him.
Finally, on Nov. 9, Trump’s campaign announced her hiring.
Pierson said she did not seek work with Cruz’s campaign and that she prefers the life of an outside activist, making an exception for Trump only because of his unorthodox style of campaigning — and because she believes he is the best candidate.
“Cruz would be a good president, but I think right now with all the hyperpartisanship in the country, I think Trump would be the better person to transition out of Obama,” she said. “It would be a softer transition for some on the left. It would be a harder transition for some on the right.”
Besides, she said, “When Donald says, ‘I think you’re great, I really want you to work for me,’ I don’t think any sane person would say no to that.”
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