Among the herd of reporters filing past an oil portrait of Hillary Clinton in the vaulted Center Hall of the White House on Monday afternoon walked Jim Hoft, publisher of the Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog founded at the outset of George W. Bush’s second term.
It was a banner moment for the decade-old website, known for reporting obvious hoaxes as legitimate news and such headlines as “EXPOSED=>HILLARY HITMAN Breaks Silence,” “Dental Expert: Hillary Clinton Is Suffering From Serious Gum Infection” and “One Week After Election Loss Hillary Clinton Looks Like Death.”
Hoft was on his way to his first White House news conference in the company of self-described “brand strategist” Lucian Wintrich, the Gateway Pundit’s inaugural White House correspondent, who for his first day on the job wore a blue tie studded with elephants in every color of the rainbow to announce his gay Republican pride.
Briefly disoriented upon entering the majestic East Room, the pair soon located the gold-painted chairs that had been reserved for them and settled in for President Donald Trump’s joint appearance with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
Gateway Pundit’s mission in expanding the website’s White House coverage is, according to Wintrich—a 2012 Bard College graduate with ruffled hair and tortoise-shell glasses who could pass for a precociously dressed high school student—“to help drain the press swamp” by covering the press corps’ “very leftist and biased reporting.” Their arrival, at the invitation of Trump’s team, represents the latest yank in the tug-of-war between the administration and the mainstream media for control of The Narrative.
All administrations play politics with press access. Barack Obama circumvented the press filter by granting sit-downs to YouTube stars, and, at one infamous 2005 news conference, George W. Bush called on a sycophantic conservative blogger who, it was later revealed, worked as a male prostitute before being given a White House press pass.
But none of that matches the early efforts of the Trump administration, which has labeled the media “the opposition party” in a struggle to define the nature of reality itself.
To that end, the Trump team has gotten to work quickly stacking its briefings in its favor. In its first week in the White House, Trump’s communications team installed screens in the briefing room to allow journalists outside of Washington—including conservative talk radio hosts—to participate in them. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary who has achieved a perverse form of celebrity in the form of a brutal impersonation on Saturday Night Live, has also taken to calling on pro-Trump news outlets in a seeming attempt to deflect hard questions.
On Friday, at a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump called only on outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has aggressively courted the new president and whose flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, is being roiled by the discontent of reporters who feel it has been too soft on Trump (at a staff meeting on Monday, the paper’s editor dismissed such concerns as “fake news").
On Monday, in the minutes before Trump and Trudeau appeared, a correspondent for One America News, a fledgling network that has emerged as a consistent Trump cheerleader to the nationalist right of Fox News, stood for a live shot at the front of the East Room next to Fox’s John Roberts and CNN’s Sara Murray.
During the news conference, the only questions from American outlets went to the right-leaning Daily Caller and to Sinclair Broadcasting Network, which reportedly struck a deal with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, during the campaign to get more access to Trump in exchange for less-critical coverage of him. Both reporters conspicuously avoided asking Trump about the hottest story of the day: the status of embattled national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned hours later over revelations he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Trump and Trudeau were instead asked questions about trade and border security. Afterward, the tall, snowy-haired Hoft offered his take on this, his first such event: “Kind of quick,” he said.
Indeed, things are moving fast. The president did not call on the Gateway Pundit on Monday, nor did Spicer during his White House briefing on Tuesday, but it appears that it is only a matter of time before they do.
In its zeal for seizing on anything that makes Trump look good and the left and the mainstream media look bad, the site has published a number of obviously false stories, often deleting the posts after their source material is exposed as a parody, a hoax or just plain wrong.
Gateway Pundit has gained notice for a number of its recent missteps, including reporting that an Asian woman seen photographing Rex Tillerson’s notes at a Senate confirmation hearing was Washington Post homepage editor Doris Truong, which it was not. The site later updated its post to note that the woman in question was not Truong and to accuse the mainstream media of having “circled the wagons” to avoid reporting of the true identity of this mysterious, foreign-looking woman.
During the campaign, the site claimed that photos of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Cleveland showed the crowd for a Trump rally when in fact they depicted a victory parade for the Cavaliers’ NBA championship, and during the inauguration it reported as real a hoax picture that had been poorly photoshopped to make it appear as if Obama was touching Melania Trump’s rear end during the transfer of power.
In response to critics who call the site “fake news,” Wintrich said that other online outlets, like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, have also run with stories that were later debunked, and that “incorrect information slip-ups” are an inevitable if unfortunate consequence of a competitive new media environment in which everyone is racing to be first. “Just because the Gateway Pundit is a conservative site, I feel it’s criticized for that unfairly,” he said.
Hoft founded the website in 2005 and has grown it from a one-man operation into a site with a network of paid contributors and a handful of paid staffers. Wintrich said the operation is profitable and that its sole source of revenue is advertising. Its name refers to Hoft’s hometown of St. Louis, America’s proverbial Gateway to the West.
A friend of the late culture warrior Andrew Breitbart, Hoft has spent years in the trenches of the conservative blogosphere, making him an intimate of Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who took over Breitbart News after its namesake’s death in 2012.
Before he joined Trump’s campaign, Bannon had hosted both Hoft and Hoft’s identical twin brother, Joe, a business executive in Hong Kong, on his Breitbart radio morning show. In 2013, when Hoft fell ill with sepsis—suffering five strokes, losing an eye and getting a knee replaced—Bannon looked after the Gateway Pundit’s day-to-day operations. “He hasn’t been the demon people portray him as,” Hoft said.
The Gateway Pundit is often described a mini-Breitbart News, with Hoft playing the role of Bannon to Wintrich’s Milo Yiannopoulos, the flamboyantly gay provocateur and Breitbart Tech editor who has sought to translate the outsider conservative brand for a younger audience.
Gabe Gonzalez, a correspondent for the progressive news site Mic who has feuded with Wintrich on social media and rebuffed Wintrich’s repeated attempts to challenge him to a debate about identity politics, described Wintrich as a “knockoff Milo.” (Wintrich, for his part, called Mic a “trash publication.”)
Like Breitbart News, the Gateway Pundit became an early and fierce advocate of Trump’s presidential campaign, reporting obsessively on the size of his crowds and on dubious accounts of Ted Cruz’s alleged extramarital affairs under headlines like “Cuban Mistress Crisis.”
It has turned out to be a Faustian bargain: Hoft’s erstwhile friendships with anti-Trump conservatives like Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and the Blaze’s Dana Loesch have soured, devolving into sniping on Twitter, but traffic has boomed. Hoft said he averaged a million page views a day during the campaign—with headlines like “Black Muslim Chases, Tackles White Trump Supporter” and “WHOA! It Sounds Like Chris Matthews Just Endorsed Trump”—and that the site is now averaging 800,000 views a day.
Last June, in the wake of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Hoft came out as gay. A month later, he met Wintrich at the “Gays for Trump” party at the Republican National Convention, where the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders delivered a fiery broadside against Islam in front of photos taken by Wintrich of scrawny, shirtless men posing seductively in “Make America Great Again” hats. Wintrich, an organizer of the event, scuttled up and down three flights of stairs in a gold-embroidered MAGA hat and snapped photos of guests including Yiannopoulos and anti-Islam crusader Pamela Geller.
In August, Wintrich was fired from his advertising job in New York, which his lawyer later alleged was illegal retaliation for his political activities. (Wintrich said the matter has been settled out of court.)
After the election, Hoft said he approached Trump’s transition team about setting up a White House correspondent. In January, at Deploraball, an unofficial inauguration party at the National Press Club for Trump’s biggest super-fans, Hoft made public his plan and announced that Wintrich would fill the role, prompting elated attendees to break into chants of “Real news! Real news!”
The pair’s arrival at the White House on Monday did not go unnoticed. As I peppered them with questions, a conservative documentary crew filmed us, and a correspondent for the New Yorker made arrangements to rendezvous with them later. “It feels like being the new kid in school,” said Wintrich, who had stopped for a smoke break on the concrete steps outside the briefing room.
Earlier, Hoft had tweeted a photo of himself and Wintrich posing at the briefing room podium along with a reference to Pepe—the cartoon frog who is considered a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League and a harmless mascot by many Trump supporters—prompting David Brock’s left-leaning Media Matters to publish a post titled, “A Dangerous Troll Is Now Reporting From The White House.”
Wintrich, whose undergraduate thesis was titled “The new media as a political tool,” called the Media Matters post “Cute.”
Brock’s group has also compiled a running list of the site’s “absurdly wrong” posts, including one headlined “Rats Jump Ship” that reported on allegations that Michelle Obama had scrubbed her social media account of mentions of Hillary Clinton, which she had not. Despite it having received an “Accuracy in Media” award at a conservative conference in 2013, such egregious errors are earning the Gateway Pundit criticism from the right as well.
On Tuesday morning, anti-Trump conservative Erick Erickson greeted the pair’s arrival with a post titled, “Trump Invites a Cesspool of Fake News to Cover the White House.”
And Shapiro, a former Breitbart columnist who left the site amid a bitter falling-out with Bannon over its coverage of the presidential race, said that while Democrats have benefited from the biases of mainstream media outlets, the Trump administration’s gambits are far more brazen.
“The difference between what Obama did with the press generally is he drew from press people who were leftist-oriented. Trump is now drawing from outlets that are openly sycophantic,” Shapiro said. “In a certain way, that’s actually more honest, I guess, when they are talking to Pravda than when they’re speaking to a quote unquote ‘objective’ news source that acts as Pravda.”
But Hoft simply views his outlet as speaking for the heartland. “I’m in the Midwest,” he said. “People there feel completely different about the situation here.”
Now that the Gateway Pundit is also in Washington, it remains to be seen how it fits in with the changing Beltway establishment, or doesn’t.
Wintrich declined to say whether the outlet was trying to join the White House Correspondents' Association, the group that represents the press corps he has come here to savage, saying only, “We’re still working out all the details.”
But on its first day, the publication was already adopting some of the capital’s folkways.
Late on Monday afternoon, former Trump campaign aide and conservative media connoisseur Sam Nunberg took my phone call while kibbitzing at Off the Record, the White House-adjacent basement bar favored by Washington insiders.
Asked about the Gateway Pundit, Nunberg informed me that Hoft had just found his way to the bar, and happened to be sitting at the table right next to his. Then, Nunberg got Hoft’s attention and explained in a mischievously loud voice, “It was part of the fake news for Trump during the primary.”
At this, Hoft burst out laughing.