A columnist at Katie Britt's hometown newspaper skewered the Alabama Republican senator on Friday after she gave her party's response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union Address.
"Katie Britt gave up on being her genuine self a while back. Last night it showed — this time in front of millions of Americans," wrote Kyle Whitmire on social media with a link to his column on AL.com, the website for the publisher of newspapers including the Birmingham News and the Huntsville Times.
He reassured readers that Britt hadn't been drawn up by some kind of Republican artificial intelligence machine. But while her performance wasn't a "deepfake," he noted, it also certainly wasn't "real."
The problem, Whitmire noted, wasn't the text of the speech. It was, "The mismatched emotions, the smiles in the wrong places, the jaw clenched when it shouldn’t have been — just the indescribable weirdness.
"It was something that had to be seen, but even then, couldn’t be understood — like postmodernism, avant-garde performance art or an involuntary behavioral science experiment."
Whitmire argued that the only real success Britt had for the GOP was that, when she finished, the nation's attention had moved off Biden's speech and onto hers.
"The odds were stacked against her," Whitmire wrote. "The rebuttal to the State of the Union has always been a trap for the politically ambitious. It doesn’t matter how many bleached bones lie at the bottom of that pit, someone new will try to jump across when given the chance — a dangerous shortcut to becoming a national political figure. And they’ll be impaled at the bottom on its spikes with all the rest — somewhere between Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio’s water bottle."
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The columnist went on to claim that it was as if the speech had been writen by ChatGPT.
"The border talk was as phony as her smile," Whitmire alleged.
He noticed, too, that there were little comments that could almost be seen as endorsements for Democratic policies — such as Britt talking about a retiree in Chilton County who was forced to work as a gas station cashier to pay for his medication. Alabama doesn't have Medicaid expansion, and she doesn't offer any alternatives.
And then Britt described meeting a sex-trafficking survivor at the border. Whitmire wrote it was difficult to take her seriously on sexual assault when she endorsed Trump, who was found liable of sexual abuse by a jury.
He compared her to a long-ago Alabama congressman, Arthur Davis, who was so ambitious trying to reach higher office that he just kept rebooting himself until he couldn't even "win a campaign for Montgomery City Council."
"She couldn't be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake," he wrote.
