Katie Walsh, the deputy White House chief of staff during former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and now consultant to a variety of establishment candidates, has infuriated top allies of her former boss, including his son, by continuing to work against Trump-backed candidates.
The anger is so deep with Walsh in Trump-world right now that she was actually disinvited from a major fundraiser that Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. headlined in Washington, DC, on Wednesday night with the vast majority of the GOP conferences in both the House and Senate. A source familiar with the matter told Breitbart News that Walsh had intended to attend the fundraiser but was told she was no longer welcome after already sending in a donation and RSVP. Trump Jr. confirmed when reached by Breitbart News that he personally ordered her out of the fundraiser due to her opposition to Trump-endorsed candidates.
“She sucks,” one of former President Trump’s closest personal advisers told Breitbart News of Walsh.
“There’s a reason why President Trump fired her early on in the administration, and every day since she has been proving that it was the right decision,” a GOP operative very close to Trump added.
Walsh was, as this source close to Trump referenced, unceremoniously removed from the Trump White House just a few months into the administration and she never quite recovered as some other former Trump aides have in the eyes of the now-former president. As Trump seeks to now unify the GOP in the wake of becoming the presumptive 2024 presidential nominee after former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s exit from the race, it’s abundantly clear from conversations with top Republicans and Trump advisers that they are angry with Walsh in particular over her continued work with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s long-shot U.S. Senate campaign in Ohio.
Walsh is now a senior consultant advising the LaRose campaign, and she also advises several other clients around the country including Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).
A huge part of why Walsh is being singled out right now by Trump’s orbit is because of the fact she continues to refuse to help unite behind her former boss’s choice candidates in key races around the country, particularly Ohio which has its primary just weeks from now. Walsh is sticking with LaRose in Ohio, even though Trump months ago endorsed against LaRose in the Ohio Senate primary by instead backing businessman and outsider grassroots conservative Bernie Moreno. In his endorsement of Moreno, Trump said that Moreno is “exactly the type of MAGA fighter that we need in the United States Senate.”
“Bernie will always stand up to the Fascist ‘nut jobs’ and the spineless RINOS in order to fight the corrupt Deep State that is destroying our Country,” Trump said in endorsing Moreno way back in mid-December.
Walsh could have, at that point, very easily said to LaRose she was done doing the bidding of a candidate against Trump. But she decided to dig in her heels, and keep trying to elevate LaRose alongside her cohorts at an outfit called Convergence Media. Walsh and Convergence have even stayed with LaRose through a series of stinging revelations about the man proving Trump right in his endorsement of Moreno, including the fact that LaRose in 2020 as Ohio’s top state elections officer took funding from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to influence the process of how elections were conducted in the state and the revelation that LaRose took cash from Democrat mega-donor Reid Hoffman, who infamously visited the late Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. LaRose’s repeated public backing of amnesty for illegal aliens was not even enough to get Walsh to walk away, and now just weeks before Ohioans vote in the Senate primary Walsh is betting her entire career on LaRose—and possibly risking serious blowback on other clients like Britt and Cornyn among others for doing so.
As one could imagine, too, in the final run-up to the primary, things have gotten particularly nasty between the various camps—Moreno, LaRose, and the third candidate running state Sen. Matt Dolan. Trump Jr. has been aggressively campaigning for Moreno, and has been hammering LaRose and Dolan in the weeks before the election.
What’s more, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has also been aggressively backing Moreno alongside Trump and his family in the Senate race, and that’s where a particular Walsh moment comes in as noteworthy. Vance had tweeted out on March 2 a missive at the political consultants behind anti-Trump candidates in various places, saying: “I have a long memory. If you’re fighting Trump and his endorsed candidates politically today, don’t ask for my help in a year with your legislation or your pet projects.”
In response, a random supporter of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who dropped out of the race weeks earlier—tweeted back:
Walsh, via her Twitter account, liked that post criticizing Trump.
In addition to that revelation, one of Walsh’s proteges a consultant named Rachel Kjellman—who is also advising the LaRose in a senior capacity—liked several pro-Haley tweets last year sent by a Haley campaign staffer:
Asked for comment about all of this, Walsh tried to blame it all on rival political consultants. “I was proud to work on President Trump’s 2016 campaign, assist with the 2020 campaign, proud to work in his White House, and I’m a proud max-out donor to his 2024 campaign,” Walsh told Breitbart News. “It appears some consultants who work for opposing clients to mine in primaries are very frustrated with how effective I am. It’s sad.”
But Walsh’s statement does not address the underlying fact that she is currently working against Trump’s endorsed candidate in Ohio and the former president’s son kicked her out of a fundraiser on Capitol Hill this week because of it.
“LaRose is a pro-trans RINO and Britt is the senate poster child for fake MAGA, so it’s no surprise they share the same anti-Trump consultants between them,” an adviser to House Speaker Mike Johnson added in a statement to Breitbart News.
The Cornyn work from Walsh is also interesting given the fact that the senior Texas senator has jumped into the fray in the scramble to replace outgoing longtime Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell is not running for reelection as Senate leader after November’s elections, he announced last week, a move that set off a mad dash among possible successors including Cornyn, Senate GOP whip John Thune of South Dakota, Senate GOP conference chair John Barrasso of Wyoming, and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chair Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT). Cornyn has officially declared a campaign for the job, while Thune is widely expected to do so—and Barrasso has officially bowed out of the race opting instead to run for whip. Daines, meanwhile, has said he is focused on winning back the Senate majority for Republicans, but Trump is reportedly urging Daines to consider seeking the position—a move that may come later in the year. The fact that Walsh finds herself on the payroll of the candidate who has major issues when it comes to immigration, guns, energy, and more—and especially and particularly Trump despite Cornyn’s late endorsement of Trump—complicates matters further for her.
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