Bill Hagerty and Donald Trump in 2019
With Bill Hagerty’s benefactor and booster Donald Trump decamped to Mar-a-Lago, some people thought Tennessee’s new senator would sheepishly edge his way back toward the Haslamite, big-business, pro-Jeb Bush conservatism that defined him until Trump took over the Republican Party five years ago.
After initially committing to oppose certification of Trump’s electoral loss, Hagerty backed off in the face of an attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. The businessman and former ambassador has even voted to confirm some of new Democratic President Joe Biden’s cabinet appointees.
But he sent the strongest signal yet that he’s not abandoning his Trumpy turnabout when this week he announced his haul from the Trump administration closeout sale: Hagerty hired 13 former White House aides to staff his new Washington office.
One, though, requires special attention. Julia Hahn is Hagerty’s new senior communications adviser.
In some respects, Hahn has the appropriate résumé. Most recently, she was deputy White House communications director and deputy assistant to the president. She also worked as director of rapid response and surrogate operations for the Trump comms team and was previously a press secretary for a Republican congressman, executive producer of The Laura Ingraham Show and a reporter for Breitbart News.
It was her time at Breitbart, as an acolyte of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, that leaves the most substantial trail of breadcrumbs. (Hagerty’s office did not respond to follow-up questions about Hahn’s hiring and writings.)
Yes, there was the to-be-expected (at least for a website that had a “Black Crime” section) anti-immigrant and generally xenophobic fare. Hahn seemed obsessed by the country’s increasing diversity, using it as a cudgel to fearmonger about things as scary as “people speaking Arabic.” This lament for diminishing whiteness echoed her former boss, Ingraham, who has decried “massive demographic changes” that “none of us ever voted for.”
“Think you need to do a black on white crime #s story,” Hahn wrote to a colleague, who leaked the emails to the Southern Poverty Law Center. “How many whites have been killed by blacks since Obama has been in office?”
She once wrote a 4,000-word embrace of the famously racist novel The Camp of Saints. Hahn’s ties to famous racists like Peter Brimelow and Scott Greer were uncovered in the SPLC emails, and through her Breitbart coverage, she helped anti-Semitic politician Paul Nehlen establish a platform.
From a practical perspective, Hahn’s presence in the office could make it more difficult for Hagerty to break bread with Republican senate colleagues Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, each of whom Hahn lambasted as they in turn became Trump’s antagonists in his bid for the Republican nomination. (It was the opposite of her new boss’s progression; he backed Jeb Bush, then Marco Rubio, before settling on Trump once the nomination was more or less wrapped up.)
Though Hagerty’s office did not respond to questions about Hahn’s hiring, we have the next-best thing. Judd Deere, formerly a White House spokesperson and now Hagerty’s deputy chief of staff, told the SPLC last year that Hahn “rejects and condemns racism and hatred in all forms, and, as a Jewish American, finds bigotry of any kind to be truly abhorrent.”
One person who did respond to questions from the Scene was Peter Brimelow, the radically anti-immigrant writer (though an immigrant himself) and founder of website VDARE, which publishes white-supremacist writings among other hateful things.
“Of course she’s been ‘tied to me,’ because the CultMarx thug groups were desperate to smear Trump (and now, apparently, Hagerty). They just lie, don’t you realize that?,” Brimelow wrote before describing their interactions. “Like many of us in immigration patriot catacomb, I had a couple of minimal contacts with Julia Hahn when she was working for Ingraham and researching immigration. I don’t think anything since 2015-16.”
