Alabama Senator Katie Britt's lies about migrants is right on brand for today’s GOP

Today's GOP is a white supremacist movement

On Thursday, GOP Senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union. And then America delivered their response to Britt—and it was brutal!

Social media exploded mocking everything from Britt’s “acting class” energy to the fact she was delivering the response in a kitchen (as in that’s where the GOP thinks women belong)  to her over the top, breathless delivery.  Even Saturday Night Live got in the act in with  Scarlett Johansson making a surprise appearance as the GOP Senator in the show’s opening sketch, overperforming every line such as, “Tonight  I’ll be auditioning for the part of scary mom,” adding, “I’ll be performing an original monologue called ‘This country is hell.’”

However, one person truly loved Britt’s speech: Donald Trump. The GOP’s leader praised Britt as delivering a “GREAT” speech that was in his view “compassionate and caring.” 

Trump’s accolades for Britt should not come as a surprise. After all, Britt took a page from Trump’s own playbook by baselessly stoking fears about Brown immigrants to scare voters into supporting the white supremacist GOP.

The most compelling part of Britt’s speech involved her telling the story of a 12 year-old girl who had been sex trafficked by the drug cartels.  Britt began that portion of her speech by blaming Biden for the “border crisis,” claiming he “invited” it with his executive actions. She continued, “I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me,” adding, “She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12.”

From there, Britt detailed the painful story of this girl, saying, “She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.” After sharing more of the gruesome details of what the cartels did to the girl, Britt declared, “We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it,” adding, “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

Britt’s message was clear: Due to Biden’s border policies, a 12-year-old girl was sex trafficked by drug cartels and was repeatedly raped on US soil. However, that was not even close to the truth.

As fact checkers detailed—and Britt’s own staff has now admitted after a backlash—the sex trafficking of the 12 year old girl, Karla Jacinto Romero did not happen during Biden’s presidency. Rather it occurred between 2004 and 2008 during the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.

Second-as opposed to what Britt wanted you to believe—this horrific incident did not occur on US soil.  It took place in Mexico.

Even SNL mocked Britt’s lie with Johansson as the Senator stating, “I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking.” Johansson then added to big laughs, “Rest assured, every detail about it is real…except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”

Britt’s spokesperson—while admitting that the Senator was talking about Romero—defended the story as being “100% correct.”  The Senator—by way of statement--then pivoted to Trump’s go to of claiming that migrants are bringing drugs and murdering Americans.

In reality, Britt had to know the story was horribly misleading. But why wouldn’t she tell it? After all, fact free stories designed to gin up fears of non-white immigrants are exactly what the leader of the GOP, Trump, has been doing since he slithered down the elevator in June 2015 to kick off his 2016 presidential run--and has continued to do right through today.

Trump launched his 2016 campaign by falsely telling voters that Mexico was sending  people to the United States who were “bringing crime” and were “rapists.” Britt’s story simply conjures up that exact theme.

And this theme has been one Trump and the GOP have returned to repeatedly. During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, the cornerstone of Trump and the Republican’s campaign was warning that “caravans” filled with “thugs” who were bringing “crime” was heading to the United States.  After the 2018 election when voters rejected the GOP scare tactics and flipped control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, the GOP stopped talking “caravans.”

Despite that 2018 loss, scaring people about Latino immigrants is still Trump’s go to. In December, Trump conjured up the dangerous language of Hitler as he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. In February, Trump--while visiting the Southern Border--lied that that jails “throughout the world” were being emptied so that prisoners could travel to the US as migrants. And just last week after the Super Tuesday elections, Trump claimed, “Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime.”  In reality, the data does not support that but facts don’t matter when you are trying to scare voters about Brown people.

The Republican party was not always like this. GOP President Ronald Reagan in 1989 declared that immigrants were making our “nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas.” The 40^th President added, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

But that GOP is dead. It’s now the party of Trump. That means open bigotry and white supremacy are what is needed to move up the GOP party ladder. And that is what Britt delivered.

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