Capping a remarkable rise from a Brooklyn art gallery benefit show to the White House press briefing room, “Twinks4Trump” artist Lucian Wintrich is now a White House correspondent.
Wintrich, 28, will represent the Gateway Pundit, a far-right website where he’s written articles like “Government Leeches Scared of Federal Freeze – Threaten to Take Down Trump” and “Buzzfeed Admits Liberal ‘Fake News’ No Longer Works—Points to Gateway Pundit as News of Future.”
The site recently became infamous during the confirmation hearings of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, when it erroneously reported that Washington Post homepage editor Doris Truong was caught secretly photographing Tillerson’s notes, prompting her to face a wave of internet hate. In fact, Gateway Pundit had mistaken Truong for another person at the hearing, apparently because she was also an Asian woman.
According to Media Matters, Gateway Pundit announced the news that Wintrich would be reporting from the White House briefing room at the January 19 “Deploraball” in Washington, DC, a celebration by and for the cadre of proud internet trolls who put their efforts to the ends of electing Trump (memorably covered by This American Life.)
Wintrich’s newfound influence accompanies President Trump’s recent tweet branding certain sectors of the media “the enemy of the American people.”
Wintrich’s initial claim to fame was a photo series showing shirtless young men in “Make America Great Again” baseball hats. Those works appeared in a pro-Trump art show he organized, “DaddyWillSaveUs,” in New York in October, during the presidential campaign.
Also featuring “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, the show included a performance by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor at far-right website Breitbart News who resigned after an audio recording surfaced that included him speaking favorably about pedophilia.
A little of the flavor of Wintrich’s writing can be gleaned from the following passage, from an article in which he meets some Russians who are supposedly connected with the KGB:
Shortly after sitting down and sharing a beer with them, I (somewhat) joked that I briefly had a KGB writer submitting for a publication that a friend and I ran back in October. I told them that one of our writers presented himself as an attractive 19-year-old black conservative, named “Demarcus Owens”, but his articles were astonishingly good and well researched. It’s rare for an attractive black 19-year-old to be writing at grad school level (not racist, just an observation).