President Donald Trump’s Pentagon is already under fire for waging an expensive war against Iran and blowing a $1 trillion hole in the US budget while doing so. Yet according to a recent analysis by a conservative commentator, Trump’s Pentagon has another problem — namely, recruiting a “dunce” to secretly spread its propaganda.
“Pro-Trump internet sleuth Jennica Pounds—better known as ‘Data Republican’ to her nearly one million followers on X—made a grim announcement on Friday,” wrote The Bulwark's Will Sommer on Monday. “Deep-state operatives embedded within the Trump administration had tried to entrap her into committing treason.”
Yet while Pounds depicted her predicament as that of an innocent journalist being manipulated by the so-called “Deep State,” Sommer argued that there is a more prosaic explanation for what happened.
“In Pounds’s portentous telling, an unnamed official—soon after revealed to be Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department—had offered to leak her government documents about Cuba to publish as an ‘exclusive,’” Pounds wrote. “While Pounds was initially enthusiastic, markings on the documents prompted her to panic that she was being set up. Had she published the documents, Pounds felt, she would’ve exposed herself to criminal prosecution. She took the news of her supposed entrapment directly to her audience.”
He added, “The idea that Trump administration officials would conspire to send Pounds to prison is bizarre on its face. After all, Pounds is an administration favorite. Her tweets claiming to have data to justify Elon Musk’s cuts aimed at USAID and other government agencies made her an out-of-nowhere star during the DOGE era, even though she didn’t seem to have a solid grasp of how government spending actually worked.”
Sommer then juxtaposed Pounds’ account with Rogers’, which he viewed as more credible — but also ominous in its own way.
“‘lol, these are my text messages and documents,’ Rogers wrote on X to Pounds, seemingly amused," Sommer wrote. "‘The ‘markings’ are FOIA redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn’t a ‘trap,’ I will happily disclose the documents myself.’ She did so, defusing the situation by basically sacrificing her attempt at an orchestrated leak.”
Sommer added, “While this drama is delicious on its own merits, it highlights a real problem facing the Trump administration: a lack of talented media figures who can handle even the basic function of laundering the administration’s message.”
Ultimately the columnist concluded, “Pounds’s [sic] bumbling drew a sigh from conservative commentators who have yearned since the days of Andrew Breitbart for a more professional Republican journalistic class. At the same time, far-right figures who love Rogers for her work boosting European extremists and far-right Twitter personalities hustled to her defense.”
Earlier on Monday, AP Pentagon reporter Konstantin Toropin confirmed on behalf of the Defense Department that “Ms. Pounds serves at the Department of War as a Special Government Employee.”
