Lord first worked as a press aide in the
Pennsylvania State Senate. He worked for Pennsylvania congressman
Bud Shuster as
legislative director and
press secretary and for U.S. senator
H. John Heinz III as
executive assistant. Later, Lord worked as
chief of staff to
Drew Lewis, for part of the time that Lewis was a co-chairman of Pennsylvania for the
Ronald Reagan presidential campaign. He also served in the
Reagan White House as an associate political director 1987–1988. He also worked for
Jack Kemp during the presidency of
George H. W. Bush. His more recent book, published in January 2016 (from which he gained the name, "The Trump Defender"), is
What America Needs: The Case for Trump.
Political commentator In July 2010, after
Shirley Sherrod stated that one of her relatives had been
lynched in the 1940s, Lord wrote an article in
The American Spectator pointing out
the man in question had actually been beaten to death by police officers. Lord questioned Sherrod's "veracity and credibility". He faced substantial criticism as a result, including criticism from other contributors to
American Spectator. In August 2011, Lord wrote an article in
The American Spectator criticizing Texas Republican Congressman
Ron Paul and the views of some of his supporters. The article sparked considerable debate within the conservative movement. In March 2016, during a
Super Tuesday election night on CNN, an argument ensued for several minutes between Lord and a CNN contributor,
Van Jones, about Lord's defense of Donald Trump. The argument came about when a fellow contributor, conservative commentator
S. E. Cupp, accused Trump of "crazy,
dog whistle policy proposals", that she believed he had made to attract prejudiced voters, and because Trump had hesitated to disavow
KKK leader
David Duke in a CNN interview the previous weekend. Lord responded that the KKK many decades earlier had supported Democrats, so the KKK was therefore left wing. He accused those who raised these worries of dividing Americans by race. Van Jones questioned the relevance of the first point and declared the second point "absurd,” as Democrats at the time were conservative and Republicans liberal. Lord responded that "history matters" and claimed that Democrats continue to divide citizens by race today and that doing so is "morally wrong". In April 2017, on a CNN discussion program hosted by
Don Lemon and featuring three other panelists including CNN commentator
Symone Sanders, Lord maintained, as he had on an earlier CNN program, that President
Donald Trump was the "
Martin Luther King" of health care, explicitly comparing and equating Trump tactics to King tactics. This infuriated both Lemon and Sanders. Lemon ended the program after a few more minutes of discussion. CNN dismissed Lord on August 10, 2017, after he tweeted "
Sieg Heil!" to Angelo Carusone, president of
Media Matters for America, suggesting Carusone was a fascist. CNN subsequently filled Lord's role as a pro-Trump contributor with Missouri politician
Ed Martin. Lord's firing was criticized by journalists, commentators, and Republican operatives, including
Bill Maher,
Steve Bannon,
Roger Stone,
Sean Hannity, and John Micek. ==Bibliography==