Trump’s new press secretary is a special kind of terrible. Kayleigh McEnany has a short, but dense career of lying and being racist. She isn’t much different than the parade of press secretaries and Trump-supporting pundits we’ve seen over the past few years, but she is willing to confidently match the kind of reality-free revisionist history the Trump administration demands of its subordinates. With the announcement that McEnany is no longer just a bigoted, lying pundit on Fox News and is now the main liaison between Trump’s White House and the traditional media has come just the tiniest more attention to who and what McEnany is.
A sample of the kind of lying we can all plan on seeing over the next however many weeks can be summed up with tweets from McEnany, like this:
The date there is March 12, 2020. According to reality, the U.S. tested around 700,000 during the first week of April and has tested below 2 million people since the first American tested positive for the virus back in January. Even Trump’s White House was saying there had been fewer than 400,000 tests completed in the U.S.—two weeks after McEnany’s dumb assertion above.
But today, this special clip showing McEnany on CNN, lambasting then-President Barack Obama for playing golf immediately following the death of journalist Daniel Pearl, is the lie we will watch. As with most catastrophic American events, a Republican was in office at the time of Pearl’s death, not then-Senator Barack Obama. A lot has been made of McEnany’s education, and while I suspect she is smarter than she seems, I doubt she is as smart as some want to believe.
McEnany has gone after President Obama before, trying and failing to defend Donald Trump’s bizarre lie that Barack Obama founded ISIS. This is exactly the kind of craven person we have come to expect out of this administration.