Lifestyle
She’s Young, Trump-Friendly, and Has a White House Press Pass
The waitress was pouring tap water. But Natalie Winters was quick to ask for bottled.
“No fluoride for our dear dinner guest!” she said, gesturing to me. “Only filtered water and pesticide-free limes.”
We were sitting in the back corner of Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill bistro that has become a destination for friends and supporters of President Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, Ms. Winters’s current boss, has hosted private events there. Her former boss, Raheem Kassam, the editor in chief of The National Pulse, is an investor. The menu that night featured lamb tartare, oysters brûlée and pork cheeks.
Ms. Winters and I had met for dinner, or so I had thought. “Honestly,” she said, “I’m probably not going to eat because that’s my brand. I don’t eat at restaurants because I don’t like the seed oils that they use.”
At 24, Ms. Winters has been a White House correspondent since Jan. 28. She reports for Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, whose audience includes large swaths of the Republican base, high-level officials and the president himself.
She belongs to a group of journalists from conservative outlets who have taken on a new national prominence in recent months as they jostle for positions in the cramped James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has described long-established news media organizations as increasingly irrelevant while accusing them of spreading “lies.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association, which includes journalists from dozens of outlets, has criticized the new administration’s handling of the press, saying it discourages independent reporting and gives priority to those who favor President Trump’s agenda. But the elevation of nontraditional outlets has been a good thing for Ms. Winters and some other journalists in the West Wing, including those representing Breitbart News and Lindell TV, the platform founded by the conspiratorial MyPillow salesman Mike Lindell.
When Ms. Winters is not seated beside Mr. Bannon in the basement studio of his townhouse near the Capitol, she is often reporting to the loyal “War Room” audience from outside the White House, delivering off-the-cuff monologues that pillory Democrats and, sometimes, her fellow reporters.
“It’s very gonzo, which I like,” she said. “I think of it as an I.Q. test every day.”
Ms. Winters describes herself as a “populist nationalist,” like Mr. Bannon. She says she “detests” more Republicans than she admires. She frequently attacks party leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson and usually supports Mr. Trump.
“Even though I agree with most of what Trump does,” Ms. Winters said, “it’s because I ideologically agree with him. Not because I am a cultist.”
She counts Mr. Bannon not only as her co-host and boss, but also as her mentor. When he went to federal prison last year for defying a subpoena from a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, he entrusted her to host “War Room” in his absence.
Since Mr. Trump’s reascension, her profile has skyrocketed to the point where she says she is recognized in restaurants and airports. She says her parents have been surprised by her often combative onscreen persona.
“It’s such a different version of myself than I am in my day-to-day life,” she said, adding, “I don’t even recognize myself.”
Ms. Winters grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., the daughter of a physician father and a stay-at-home mother. She attended Harvard-Westlake, an elite prep school in Los Angeles, and was relatively apolitical until the 2016 campaign was underway.
Various school activities struck her as liberal-coded and performative. First it was a bake sale intended to raise awareness of the gender pay gap. “Just straight-up bogus,” Ms. Winters said. Then came the student walkout in protest of gun violence after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. “A school-sanctioned walkout,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Her only published piece in the high school paper was a letter to the editor in which she made the case for the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. It was not well received on the mostly liberal campus. Because of her conservative views in general and her support of Mr. Trump in particular, she was ostracized by her peers, she said.
“Maybe the trope that everything goes back to high school trauma is true,” she added.
During her senior year, after she learned she had gotten into the University of Chicago, she more or less stopped going to class. She skipped her high school graduation day because she was flying to Washington to start working as an intern for Mr. Kassam, who was then a “War Room” co-host. She also missed out on prom. “It was the best thing I ever did,” she said.
During her first year of college, Ms. Winters became a “War Room” staff writer. She frequently commuted to Washington instead of attending class. “My best friend from college is, like, Steve,” she said, referring to Mr. Bannon. As Covid spread across the globe, she made her first on-camera appearance.
“The pandemic’s really where she got her sea legs,” Mr. Bannon said in a phone interview. He used some baseball-scout lingo to describe Ms. Winters, calling her “a five-tool player.”
She has raised her visibility with her appearances on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” a YouTube talk show hosted by the former CNN personality. “She is always a lively and provocative contributor, even if I don’t agree with many of her views,” Mr. Morgan said by text. But Ms. Winters insists she’d be happy spending her days sifting through federal databases.
“She’s essentially a nerd at heart,” Mr. Bannon said.
One of the biggest feuds on the right has been between Ms. Winters’s boss and Elon Musk, who, with the president’s blessing, has embedded himself within the federal government. At the height of the rift, Mr. Bannon called Mr. Musk a “truly evil person.” In response, Mr. Musk wrote on X: “Bannon is a great talker but not a great doer.”
The spat has put Ms. Winters in a unique position. Mr. Musk is one of her 630,000 followers on X, and he frequently reposts her. She has lauded him and his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“I think I’m the only person who could bring them together and get peace,” she said, laughing.
Ms. Winters may be a White House correspondent, but her job is not so much to cover Mr. Trump’s avalanche of executive actions as it is to report and comment on what she labels “opposition forces,” whether they be Democratic politicians, liberal organizations or major news outlets.
Hugo Lowell, a White House correspondent for The Guardian, said that Ms. Winters differs from other reporters on the beat because she is “vocal about her own political views and clearly infuses them into her coverage.”
“But she’s good on TV,” Mr. Lowell added, “and she has built up an audience with Trump’s base that translates to a degree of influence in a fragmented media ecosystem.”
Ms. Winters compared the White House briefing room to high school. “This is my first time in a professional setting where my MAGA royalty clout means nothing,” she said.
Her outsider status was confirmed when the National Press Club rejected her bid to become a member. Asked about the denial of Ms. Winters’s application, a spokesperson for the organization, which was founded in 1908 and has roughly 2,500 members, said: “Decisions are made in alignment with the standards of journalism we uphold. We do not publicly comment on individual applications out of respect for all involved.”
Many White House reporters affiliated with large news organizations do not talk to her, Ms. Winters said, and several of them contacted for this article declined to comment. But, ultimately, someone who has blasted much of the news media as “ground zero of left-wing opposition to Trump” was always going to be in for a chilly reception.
At Butterworth’s, true to her word, Ms. Winters had only bottled water during our three-hour talk.
She said she has had two drinks in her life and has never done drugs. She also has a budding lifestyle brand. Items for sale include a tank top with “More insecure than the border” plastered across the front and a tote that reads “A little conspiratorial.”
Her cable news network of choice is MSNBC, which she watches partly to generate material. She said that in another world she might have been a poetry professor. “I always joke — in my day-to-day life, I really am a lib at heart,” she said.
She also loved “Barbie” and agreed with the monologue delivered by America Ferrera, in which her character says, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.” But, Ms. Winters caveats, “It’s also really hard to be a man.” She added that scores of women younger than she had asked her not only for career advice but also for tips on how to be like her.
Like a growing Gen-Z contingent, she is “anti-app,” meaning dating apps. One day, she would like to settle down with a man she can be “submissive” to, she said. She added that she had been wronged in past relationships, which only stoked her ambitions.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to get revenge,” she said. “You can watch me on TV being the next big deal.’”
Lonnie Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian. He’s pictured above in September 2017.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
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J. Scott Applewhite/AP
In a memo addressed to staffers sent Tuesday, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Lonnie G. Bunch III, defended the institution after the White House issued a 162-page report that characterizes the National Museum of American History as a place which has become “subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”
In his email, which NPR has obtained, Bunch wrote in part: “While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story. As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection and growth.”
He continued: “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy and integrity. For nearly 180 years, the Smithsonian has worked alongside partners across government — from the White House to Congress to our governing Board of Regents — guided by our enduring mission to increase and diffuse knowledge. That purpose remains: to pursue knowledge with rigor and to serve the American public with clarity and care.”
The White House report was issued on July 4 by the Domestic Policy Council under the title “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage.”
The council faults the National Museum of American History on a multitude of fronts, saying it underemphasized the Founding Fathers and early colonial and Revolutionary history; was not sufficiently celebratory of the country’s 250th anniversary; and that it engaged in “anti-white,” “illegal alien” and transgender activism.
It also accuses the museum of trying to “indoctrinate” teachers and students through its exhibitions, programming and teaching resources.
In the report, the council also specifically criticizes museum director Anthea Hartig, who has led the National Museum of American History since 2019 and is concurrently the president of the Organization of American Historians, calling her “an activist advancing an ideological agenda contradictory to the museum’s founding purpose of fostering patriotism.”
The Trump administration has made the Smithsonian museums one of its primary targets in its efforts to reshape cultural narratives to align with its viewpoints. In August 2025, the White House requested a “comprehensive internal review” of eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of American History, following an executive order issued by President Trump in March 2025 in which he called for the removal of “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s offerings.
According to the Smithsonian’s charter, all of its 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo are meant to be run independently of the federal government. The Smithsonian is overseen by Bunch and a board of regents, which includes Vice President Vance, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and other members appointed by Congress.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Bunch spoke about the Smithsonian’s 250th anniversary special exhibition at the Smithsonian Castle, which is called “American Aspirations.”
He told NBC: “It’s really important for people to understand that America is much an ideal as it is a place, that it’s a series of aspirations that have really shaped who this country is. And so for me, what is so powerful is to say, ‘Let us honor the words of Thomas Jefferson and the founders, but let us use those to challenge us to be better.’”
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story.
It was after the death of her son, Laith, that Esme Saleh decided to become a folk artist.
She had always been creative, experimenting with watercolors and learning to sew and embroider at a young age.
“I had a creative inkling,” she said, “but I never pursued it.”
Everything changed on Aug. 17, 2013.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
When Saleh was nine months pregnant, she woke up with stomach pains and presumed she was in labor. She and her husband, Nasim, immediately went to the hospital, where doctors checked her and put the baby on a heart monitor. Saleh’s blood pressure was high, however, and the baby’s heart rate kept dropping. After about an hour, his heartbeat stopped. Doctors rushed her in for an emergency C-section, but it was too late. Laith did not survive.
Saleh lost a tremendous amount of blood and developed postpartum HELLP syndrome, a dangerous form of preeclampsia, but doctors were able to stabilize her.
When she woke up, the first thing she asked was, “How’s my baby?”
After losing her son in 2013, Esme Saleh left her job as a television producer. Since then, she has sold her hand-painted candles to local designers in Los Angeles and to LVMH in Paris.
“Aug. 17, 2013, was the most difficult day of my life, and Aug. 22 was the second most difficult, the day we drove home with an empty car seat,” she said of her and her husband’s new reality.
They named their son Laith Finn Saleh.
“His first name means ‘lion’ in Arabic. His middle name is an ode to Huckleberry Finn — sharp wit, kind heart, strong moral compass — all the attributes he’s imparted on us in spirit,” said Saleh, 45.
After such a devastating loss, she found it difficult to trust the world again. “It was hard to trust anything,” she said. “The medical system. Myself. It made me realize the fragility of bringing anything to life. We take so much for granted.”
So after years of working as a television producer, Saleh left broadcast journalism and leaned into her creative spirit.
She grew up in San Diego. Her mother was raised on a farm in Mexico, and her father moved from Tijuana to Los Angeles to be near her mother, who started working for a family in Sherman Oaks at 16. They eventually settled in San Diego, where Saleh’s father, now a church deacon, worked as a car salesman.
“The word Mystic has also become a driving force of what this journey means to me,” Saleh says. “A magical, otherworldly journey that has led me to some beautiful friendships, projects and unlimited well of curiosity. When I paint each pair of candles, it feels like I’m imparting a piece of that magic.”
“He always wanted to be a weatherman on TV,” she said, explaining how he hoped to get his big break on television by doing a weather report from the car lot.
Saleh wanted to be a broadcast journalist as her father had. After graduating from San Diego State, she interned in the sports department at CBS affiliate KFMB-TV although she didn’t know much about sports. She enjoyed sharing information with people, learned how to write plays of the week and felt she had found the right career.
But during a summer class at Mesa College, she started to think journalism might not be for her.
Saleh’s home is filled with her artwork. “My home expresses a lot of the things that I do,” she says. “If it works here, then I feel like I can put it out in the world.”
“I’m an empath — a sensitive soul — so when I was reading news about death and destruction, my eyes could not lie,” she said. Her professor told her, “This may not be your thing.” But when she arranged flowers on camera, she really came alive. She decided to work behind the scenes as a producer.
Her professor helped her get her first network news job in 2003, and she moved to Los Angeles, working on hard news and entertainment coverage.
After losing Laith a decade later, she couldn’t keep doing red-carpet interviews and acting like everything was fine. “It all felt so different, superficial and hard,” she said. “I felt like there was a bigger purpose out there for me. It’s in the small things that we find the big things.”
She started by painting folk art-inspired invitations for a friend’s baby shower. She painted delicate flowers, oranges and leaves on glass, leather and even lampshades. She created a logo. “I was just trying to say yes to things that were really scary,” she said. “Laith gave me the courage to do that.”
“I was just trying to get out of hole,” Saleh says of taking up painting after her son died.
Her first son, she said, became “a catalyst for painting.”
Then, at the first Thanksgiving during the COVID-19 pandemic when people could gather again, she had a light-bulb moment. “I was setting the table and didn’t have flowers or anything to add to decorate, so I thought, ‘I have these candles. I’m going to paint them and make them fancy,’ ” she said.
Her guests were impressed.
As time went on, painting taper candles helped her find joy again, and others noticed too.
“The one thing I hear when people pick up a pair of my candles is, ‘This makes me so happy. It makes me feel like there’s life here,’ ” she said.
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1. Saleh sometimes leads painting workshops where participants can decorate items like ornaments and lampshades.
2. Leather napkin rings Saleh has painted for Nathan Turner. 3. Saleh’s hand-painted candles retail for approximately $42 to $50.
One of the hardest parts of losing a child “is that you’re not just grieving the person, you’re grieving the future you imagined with them,” said Chicago-based grief specialist Carla Harvey. “A lifetime of love suddenly has nowhere to go. Creating art doesn’t erase grief, but it can become a way to carry it.”
Saleh created her brand Mystic by Esme in 2021, but it took her some time before she could gather the courage to try to sell them.
When she brought a shoebox full of samples to Nickey Kehoe, the L.A. store agreed to carry her candles. “I was beside myself,” Saleh said.
“Her candles were absolutely beautiful, and she had a fantastic spirit that made selling them a no-brainer,” said interior designer Todd Nickey, co-founder of Nickey Kehoe.
Saleh gets a surprise kiss from her dog Olive while painting candles at her dining room table.
Saleh viewed her new side project as a way to earn extra money for piano lessons for her 11-year-old son Linus, who is an entrepreneur like his mother. “I felt proud painting the candles while he was in lessons in the next room,” she said. “It became this circular economy, and it led to bigger opportunities for me.”
Last year, luxury conglomerate LVMH commissioned Saleh to paint 465 pairs of candles, or 930 candles in total, for its Chaumet jewelry brand. The collection was unveiled at an elaborate event at the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay, just outside Paris.
“It was fun,” Saleh said about the process, which took six months from conception to delivery. “I felt like I was dressing my candles up for a party.”
Always a hard worker, which she attributes to being a first-generation child of immigrant parents, Saleh has now created a candle collection for Pierce and Ward in Los Feliz, leather napkin holders for interior designer Nathan Turner and pomegranate wrapping paper for Olive Ateliers. The candles retail between $42 to $50 for a pair, and recently, she developed a handsome pewter candle shaver that will be released in the winter.
Her dining room can sometimes feel like “an assembly line,” Saleh says.
Saleh holds a pair of candles she has embellished with florals.
Occasionally, she leads painting workshops, and she loves helping others tap into their creativity. The most meaningful one for her was an ornament workshop attended by several victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. “Without saying anything, we understood each other,” she said. “I understood that they were trying to create memories.”
Saleh knows what it means for things not to last — “impermanence,” she calls it — whether it is homes, candles or life itself.
She paints every day in the art-filled dining room of her home (unless it’s Little League season), surrounded by her family, candles and her two dogs, Lennon and Olive. ”Painting is like meditation,” she said. “You can sit in your dining room and tune everything out and just be in the moment.”
Even the family’s summer bucket list receives an artistic flourish.
An arch inside Saleh’s home receives a personalized touch.
She knows painting candles isn’t new, but she believes her motivation and the care she puts into each candle makes them special beyond their looks.
She has learned to look at the world that way, that painting in her dining room has offered her healing and joy, that she can trust herself and her body, that continuing to be inspired by her two boys — “one in spirit and the other here on Earth” — means that Laith will always be with her.
Many people think healing means moving on, said grief specialist Harvey, but “it’s really about finding ways to move forward while keeping the people we love woven into our lives. That’s what I see in her candles, not an ending, but an ongoing relationship with her son.”
“I feel like my son is channeling through this medium,” Saleh said, her voice breaking as she painted a taper. “He’s whispering to me, ‘Mom, this is your path.’ That has been my driving force. We’re going to grow this together.”
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