Jessica Reed Kraus: "I feel like [Donald Trump] kind of represents the old-school values of like… America’s father." Photo / houseinhabit, Instagram
Before the pandemic, Jessica Reed Kraus chronicled family life. Then she began posting about vaccines, Trump and Johnny Depp, and suddenly the American right had a new darling. Now she’s a regular at Mar-a-Lago.
Donald Trump has very soft hands. “Very soft hands,” says Jessica Reed Kraus. “I don’t think he’s ever changed a tyre in his life.” We’re in the restaurant of the Wall Street Hotel in Lower Manhattan. “The first time I met him, [I found] he’s very soft-spoken,” she says.
Soft-spoken? Trump?
“He is! He’s really soft-spoken. Soft hands, soft voice, very tall,” she says. “Everything about him in person, I feel, is a little softer, because he comes off as such an exaggerated character in the media. And then in person, he’s a lot softer.”
I first met Kraus, now in her mid-40s, three years ago, queuing up to get into the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Someone told me she was a mother of four who had left her home in California to attend the trial and to post about it online. I couldn’t quite understand it. I suspected, naturally, that she was a nutcase.
Now she is a power in the land, with 1.3 million Instagram followers and a Substack blog that has 452,000 subscribers. Kraus says it generates revenues of between US$1 million and $2m a year (NZ$1.7m - $3.5m). Now she gets invited to Mar-a-Lago. Now, when she comes to New York, she stays at the Wall Street Hotel.
Her detractors call her a peddler of conspiracy theories and one-sided coverage of celebrity court cases and campaign rallies. Those critics saw Kraus leading the online savaging of Amber Heard during her court battle with Johnny Depp, publishing an extensive list of conspiracy theories about the Princess of Wales on her Substack when the princess had not been seen in public for 77 days, and offering what one writer described as “a sometimes queasy blend of journalism and fluffery” while covering Trump.
Her account of meeting him for the first time on a rooftop at Mar-a-Lago does make him sound like that fellow in the old chocolate advertisements, who appeared to women on starlit windowsills, all because the lady loves Milk Tray.
It was “my first time at Mar-a-Lago”, she says. “It was a magical night.” She was drinking champagne. Then someone whisked her upstairs and seated her among a party of strangers on the roof. It was a warm tropical evening, with rain in the air and a full moon overhead. A Sinéad O’Connor song was playing, then a track from The Phantom of the Opera.
“One of the guys says, ‘You know who’s controlling the music?’ ” She turned. “Right behind me was Donald Trump, sitting with his friends. And he had his iPad.” For he controls the music of the night. He turns it up very loud. “It’s blaring through the whole [place]. Everywhere you go, it’s just blaring on the speakers,” Kraus says. When the time came for The Donald to turn in for the evening, she and four others were directed to line up at the entrance to a hallway that leads to his private quarters, she says.
“When he got to me, he looked at me and shook my hand and he goes, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ And I don’t think he really knew who I was. [I think] they just told him, she’s maybe giving you flattering coverage.”
Like many of Trump’s followers, Kraus sees him as a father figure.
“I feel like he kind of represents the old-school values of like… America’s father, where he’s here to sort of stop all the nonsense,” she says. “It’s really sort of a no-nonsense mentality where, you know, he speaks pretty simply. I think he’s brilliant, but I think he uses, you know, the same five adjectives.”
Kraus grew up in Corona, a city southeast of Los Angeles, the third child of four. Her father struggled with drug addiction and took his own life when she was six. As a teenager, Kraus wanted to be a gossip columnist, but settled on becoming an English teacher who wrote fiction on the side. She got admitted to a teaching college “and then I got pregnant”, she says.
Her boyfriend, Mike, who is now her husband, was a touring musician. But when Kraus was expecting their first son, Arlo, he got a job in construction. On the side, he renovated their home in San Clemente, California, and she began writing about it “to show people what they could do on a budget. And people liked watching it in real time.”
Kraus was a liberal and a devout CNN watcher, with a liberal following. Then the pandemic shook things up. She didn’t like the vaccine mandates, or the rules that made her children wear masks in the classroom but not the playground. “Nothing made sense,” she said. She watched Trump’s Covid press conferences and felt that they were being unfairly portrayed in the media, and in the conversations of her Los Angeles friends, who mocked Trump’s stray remark about injecting bleach while keeping crystals in their water bottles.
“I was just so angry,” she says. Alongside her audience of liberals. “Unknowingly I was collecting a lot of anti-vax mothers and Kennedy supporters.”
In this fractious period, the strange story of Britney Spears’ efforts to free herself from a court-imposed conservatorship seemed to Kraus to offer something that would unite her readership, allowing them to stop fighting about vaccines and focus on saving Britney. She also discovered that she could go along to watch the court hearings.
“I was like, ‘Oh! I can do this,’ ” she says.
A few months later, I met her in the dawn queue for the sex-trafficking trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. At first, as I said, I didn’t know what to make of her. The trial did attract some fruitcakes, but most arrived later and filled a series of overflow rooms that were opened for the public on upper floors, so that it sometimes seemed that the company got steadily crazier the higher up the building you went.
Kraus, however, was there as the sun came up and she usually made it into the courtroom. There were times when it looked helpful to be operating as a member of the public, rather than as a card-carrying journalist. But it was also expensive. After a week she flew home. There, she says, an owl began appearing in her back garden with such regularity that she started to write about it, wondering if it was a portent of her own death. Various readers assured her that an owl was actually a symbol of “the death of delusion” and the search for truth. Kraus decided that it meant she should return to New York. For the first time, she asked her followers for donations to cover the trip. Within three days, she had raised $50,000.
This demonstration of the appetite for her work convinced her to set up a Substack blog, to which readers paid to subscribe. She posted her notes from the Maxwell trial there and then her thoughts on Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife, Amber Heard. She felt that Depp was being unfairly presumed to be the abuser. A friend of Depp’s called her, before the trial began, and then put Depp himself on the phone, she says.
Kraus was in her van, watching her youngest son play football. She did not record the call and her recollection of it is a little loose, but she says they talked about Hunter S Thompson and Jack Nicholson. Depp compared himself to a fallen Disney prince. “He said, ‘One day you’re the hero, then overnight you’re the hunchback,’ ” she says.
It sounds as if he was trying to win her over. “He was thanking me,” she says, “for not going with a preconceived narrative.”
That first year, via subscriptions, “I want to say I hit $1m or maybe $800,000,” she says. Mike quit his job, to look after the kids, though quite often she brings them along for the ride. Hayes, the youngest, is upstairs in their hotel room as we speak, she says. “I just signed up Hayes for independent study so he could come on these trips with me,” she says.
Every morning, she says, her phone starts buzzing at about 3am with texts from readers in London and then New York. Early in 2023, among her deluge of text messages, there was one from Courtney Love, telling her that Robert F Kennedy Jr was about to mount a presidential campaign. “Courtney Love knows everything,” Kraus says, dreamily. “The secrets of the universe.”
But Kraus was not particularly interested in this one. Nor was she all that excited when she received a call from Kennedy’s godson inviting her to Kennedy’s house. It turned out they wanted her to sit beside him on a sofa and endorse his run for the presidency.
In time, Kraus would warm to the man, accompanying him to campaign events and parties and offering a glowing portrait of Kennedy, against the prevailing view of him as a crank and dispenser of vaccine misinformation who went about spreading measles on Pacific islands.
After he announced that he would run as an independent, he invited her on a hike. “The hike was so hard I couldn’t breathe,” she says. “So I couldn’t ask him any questions.” But riding with Kennedy and his dogs in his battered old van to the starting point of the walk, Kraus talked about a trip she was about to make to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She had not yet found a place to stay. “You can probably stay at my house,” Kennedy said.
“That’s probably one of my favourite memories of my life,” she says. “It’s like everything you’d expect from the Kennedys. Bicycles everywhere, the beds are pushed together, all the art is sailboats and family photos.”
She woke with a view of the ocean and the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port and the lawn where John F Kennedy and Bobby and Teddy tossed around a football. “I looked through all his photo albums,” Kraus says.
She took a similar delight in nosing around Mar-a-Lago. “What’s so incredible is, at night, or if you’re there when the staff are off, you can just roam the whole [place],” she says. “I went up into little secret bedrooms.” She posted a picture of herself taking a nap on a sofa in the living room modelled after Versailles.
Kennedy eventually endorsed Trump in August, and is now Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to the dismay of a great many public health experts.
I ask Kraus if she acted as an intermediary between the two camps.
“I didn’t directly connect them,” she says. Though she thinks that her posts may have helped to explain Kennedy to the Trump team. Don Jr had begun messaging her, on Instagram, she says. “We would fight about Kennedy because he thought he was too liberal… I said, ‘OK, but I want you guys to go falcon hunting.’ ”
Kraus posted photographs of the resulting expedition: the two men in the autumn sunshine in a gorgeous corner of upstate New York, handling some fabulous-looking birds. They don’t look too bad themselves. Kraus said several of her readers complained that they had been “unsettled” by the sight of Don Jr looking attractive. Kennedy and Don Jr “stand as a bulwark against a culture undermining traditional manhood in America”, she wrote.
She does worry about getting too close to her subjects. “I have to remind myself I don’t work for these people,” she says. The other thing she worries about is getting too big. “I already get recognised at events. I like to blend in.”
“The mainstream has become fringe and the fringe has become mainstream,” the former Obama adviser Van Jones observed after the election. Newspaper and television reporters are now camped out in Palm Beach, scrabbling around for stories at the gates of Mar-a-Lago. Kraus gets invited inside.
When I speak to her again over the phone a few weeks later, she’s preparing to go back to Palm Beach for New Year’s Eve. She’s either going to Mar-a-Lago or to the house of the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “I feel like I’ve been at Mar-a-Lago more than at my kids’ school PTA this year,” she says. Then she’ll attend Trump’s inauguration. Afterwards, she expects to get into the White House to write about the new administration. “Don Jr told me they are determined to get people like me in there,” she says.
There will be some who see this as the end of the world as we know it: the steady replacement of a press corps in the White House with a crew of podcasters and influencers cheering on Trump. Kraus sees it as the rise of independent-thinking mums like her, who have decided to go and find out for themselves. “That’s how I feel,” she says. “I’ve got to go and take matters into my own hands.”
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
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