As she left the James S. Brady Briefing Room in early April, Natalie Winters, the newly minted White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room, tried to describe the relationship between the White House press corps’ old guard and the “new conservative media” who’ve entered the briefing room in the early days of the second Trump administration.
“You know when you’re at a party and you see someone who you don’t technically know, but you know them like through a friend from social media, and it’s that awkward question of, like, ‘Do I say hi or do I not?’” Winters told me. “It’s a room full of that, except you know the people because you bash them on TV.”