The waitress was pouring tap water. However, Natalie Winters quickly sought a bottle.
“There's no fluoride for my dear dinner guests!” she said gestured at me. “Only filtered water and pesticide-free stones.”
We sat in the back corner of Butterworth, the Capitol Hill Bistro, which became the destination of President Trump's friends and supporters. Winters' current boss Stephen K. Bannon is hosting a private event there. Her former boss, Raheem Kassam, is the editor-in-chief of National Pulse and an investor. The menu that evening featured lamb tartare, oyster brulee and pork blush.
Mr. Winters and I met for dinner. “Be honest,” she said. “I'm not going to eat it because it's my brand. I don't like the seed oil they use, so I don't eat it in restaurants.”
At 24 years old, Winters has been a White House correspondent since January 28th. She reports Bannon's “War Room” podcast.
She belongs to a group of conservative outlet journalists who have taken away the new nation's famous people over the past few months to get a job in the cramped James S. Brady Brazy Briefing Room. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused him of spreading “the lies,” while explaining that the well-established news media organization is increasingly irrelevant.
The White House Correspondents, which includes dozens of outlet journalists, criticised the new administration's handling of reporting, blocking independent reporting and saying it will be prioritized for those who support President Trump's agenda. However, the altitude of the non-traditional outlets has been good for other West Wing journalists, including those representing Miss Burt News and Lindell Television, including the platform founded by Mike Lindell, Mike Lindell, a salesman for Miss Mypillow.
When Winters is not sitting beside Bannon in the studio in the townhouse basement near the Capitol, she often reports to a loyal “war room” audience from outside the White House, delivering the cuff monologues to pillar Democrats and sometimes her fellow reporters.
“It's very gonzo and I like it,” she said. “I consider it a daily IQ test.”
Winters describes himself as a “populist nationalist” like Bannon. She says she “hate” more Republicans than she admires. She frequently attacks party leaders like speaker Mike Johnson, usually supporting Trump.
“I agree with most of what Trump is doing,” Winters said. “That's because I ideologically agree with him.
She counts Bannon as a co-host and boss as well as a mentor. When he went to federal prison last year for rebelling against a subpoena from a Congressional committee investigating the January 6th riots, he entrusted her to host a “war room” in her absence.
Since Trump's re-recognition, her profile has skyrocketed to the point that she says she is recognized in restaurants and airports. She says her parents were surprised by the often combative on-screen persona.
“It's a different version of myself than I'm in my daily life,” she said, adding, “I don't even recognize myself.”
Winters grew up in Santa Monica, California, with the daughter of a doctor father and a stay-at-home mother. She attended Harvard Westlake, an elite prep school in Los Angeles, and was relatively apolitical until the 2016 campaign was underway.
Various school activities hit her as a liberal coded performance. First, there was a bake sale aimed at increasing awareness of gender pay gaps. “It's just a straight fake,” Winters said. Later, students were struck in protest of gun violence after a massive shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. “what are you doing?”
Her only published article in her high school paper was a letter to the editor, arguing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh with the Supreme Court. It was not well received on mostly liberal campuses. She was banished by her peers, she said, because of her conservative views in general and her support for Trump in particular.
“The trope that perhaps everything goes back to high school trauma is true,” she added.
During her fourth year, after learning that she had attended the University of Chicago, she more or less stopped going to class. She skipped high school graduation day. Because she flew to Washington and began working as an intern for Cassam, who was then co-host of the “War Room.” She missed the prom. “It was the best thing I've ever done,” she said.
In her first year at university, Winters became a staff writer for The War Room. Instead of attending classes frequently, she commutes to Washington. “My best friend in college is like Steve,” she said. He mentioned Bannon. As Covid spread around the world, she first appeared on camera.
“The pandemic really is just how she got her ocean feet,” Bannon said in a phone interview. He used several baseball scout languages to describe Winters, calling her “Five Tool Players.”
She increased her visibility by appearing on the YouTube talk show Piers Morgan Uncensored, hosted by a former CNN personality. “She is always an active and provocative contributor, even if I don't agree with many of her opinions,” Morgan said in the text. But Winters claims she is happy to spend her days sifting through the federal database.
“She's a nerd in nature,” Bannon said.
One of the biggest feuds on the right was between Mr Winters boss and Elon Musk. At the height of the rift, Bannon called Musk “a real evil person.” In response, Musk wrote to X: “Bannon is a great speaker, but not a great actor.”
Spat puts Winters in a unique position. Musk is one of X's 630,000 followers, and he frequently reposts her. She praised him and his leadership in government efficiency.
“I think I'm the only one who can unite them and get peace,” she said with a laugh.
Winters may be a White House correspondent, but her job isn't to cover Trump's executive action avalanche to report and comment on what she labels “opposition.”
Hugo Lowell, White House correspondent for the Guardian, said Winters is different from other reporters on Beat because she “speaks up about her own political views and clearly injects her coverage.”
“But she's good on television,” added Lowell. “And she built an audience at Trump base, which leads to some degree of influence in the fragmented media ecosystem.”
Winters compared the White House briefing room to a high school. “This is my first time in a professional environment where my magalloyalty influence means nothing,” she said.
Her outsider status was confirmed when the National Press Club refused her bid to become a member. We were asked about the application denial from Winters, a spokesman for the organization that was founded in 1908 and has around 2,500 members.
Many White House reporters from large news organizations have not spoken to her, Winters said, and some of them declined to comment because of the article. But ultimately, those who denounced many in the news media as “ground zero of the left's opposition to Trump” were always going to attend chilly receptions.
In Butterworth, who is true to her words, Winters only had bottled water in her three-hour lecture.
She said she had been drinking two drinks in her life and had never done drugs. She also has an up-and-coming lifestyle brand. Items for sale include a tank top that is painted on the front “more unstable than the border” and a tote with the words “a little conspiratorial.”
The cable news network of her choice is MSNBC, and she is partially looking to produce substances. She said in another world she might have been a professor of poetry. “I'm always kidding. In my daily life, I'm really free in my heart,” she said.
She also loved “Barbie” and agreed to a monologue that American Ferrera shared. Her character says, “It's literally impossible to become a woman.” However, Winters warns that “it's really hard to be a man.” She added that she has a score for younger women than she asked her about not only career advice but also tips on how to become like her.
Like the growing Gen-Z terms, she is “anti-app”, meaning dating apps. One day, she said she wanted to settle down with a man who could become “obedient.” She added that she was unfairly treated in her past relationships.
“I'm going to get revenge,” she said. “You can see me on TV being the next big deal.”
