Trump's Mini-Mes

The alt-right deployed a 12-year-old Trump supporter to interview Roy Moore on the eve of the special Senate election. She’s not the only kid in this weird little army

- Graham Lanktree

WATCH MILLIE MARCH OR COLE McCafferty, both of them 12, expound about their love of President Donald Trump and the platforms and candidates he endorses (most recently, Millie deployed to Alabama for a cute-if-it-weren’t-so-contextually-creepy interview with Senate candidate Roy Moore), and you’ll notice that they both speak like Trump. And like him, they seem very comfortable in front of the cameras. Here’s Millie on Trump in a 2017 video interview with Jennifer Lawrence, vice president of the America First Project, a populist-nationalist super PAC: “One of the other reasons I like him is because, and this is my favorite reason: ‘We will build a waaaallll on our southern borders. And Mexico, no buts about it, Mexico will paaaay for the wall.’” Or Cole, to Infowars’s Alex Jones, last October: “By the way, I saw your interview with Megyn Kelly; you got her good. You got her good. She thought she was going to make a fool of you, but you turned it around, and you proved her to be a liar.”

Both instances demonstrate how Trump supporters are recruiting children as spokespeople. Jones, once he got done digressing to his 12-year-old guest about Kelly’s hotness, hailed Cole as part of the new wave of resistance to the “globalists”—a term the Anti-Defamation League considers an anti-Semitic dog whistle. “These kids are being weaponized,” says Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He says the Millie and Cole interviews “camouflage” positions of the hard right “as feel-good sweetness and light, when, in fact, they are defending raw racism and sexual abuse.”