White House Privately Backchannels Its Coronavirus Messaging to Conservative Social-Media Influencer
White House Privately Backchannels Its Coronavirus Messaging to Conservative Social-Media Influencers
Dan Bongino, Sean Spicer, and Boris Epshteyn are among those who have had sessions with Mike Pence and his team in recent weeks.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-white-house-privately-backchannels-its-coronavirus-messaging-to-conservative-social-media-influencers?ref=wrap
As the coronavirus has worsened, members of the task force President Donald Trump has assigned to combat the pandemic have reached out to prominent conservative social-media “influencers” and right-wing TV and radio stars to offer them private briefings and information sessions with Vice President Mike Pence and other top administration officials, The Daily Beast has learned.
The communications strategy began backstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering that takes place just outside of Washington, D.C., and which happened to have an attendee diagnosed with coronavirus this year. The direct outreach occurred on Feb. 27—the day after Trump tapped Pence to lead the task force. There, the vice president hosted an informal briefing on COVID-19 and the administration’s latest efforts, with several right-leaning personalities with large followings on Twitter and other social-media platforms, according to a source with direct knowledge of the gathering.
The following Wednesday, Pence hosted another closed-door meeting with conservative “influencers,” with this one lasting for roughly an hour in the vice president’s office on White House grounds. The meeting was helmed by senior Trump administration officials such as Pence and Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff who previously served as Trump’s legislative-affairs director.
According to three people with knowledge of the meeting, attendees included Fox News fixture and prolific MAGA tweeter Dan Bongino; former Trump adviser and current War Room: 2020 podcast host Jason Miller; Newsmax TV host and Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer; former White House official and Sinclair “must-run” commentator Boris Epshteyn; Sinclair anchor and ex-Fox News host Eric Bolling; and former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), a Trump surrogate.
During the meeting, attendees discussed how their collective Twitter following—estimated at “tens of millions”—could be used as a bullhorn for the administration, these sources said. Pence discussed the difficulties the administration was confronting related to producing coronavirus test kits, as well as airline cleaning protocols, nursing-home cleaning measures, and the number of masks the administration hopes are produced by the company 3M. At one point, Pence mentioned how he’d recently had what he thought was a very productive conversation with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and then expressed frustration to the room about how she subsequently went before the press to bash him as anti-science, sources recounted.
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