Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s Press Secretary, Spreads Lies in Exchange for Airtime
By: Anthony Andranik Moumjian
Tags: Politics, Democracy, Trump, Donald Trump, Fake News

Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s Press Secretary, Spreads Lies in Exchange for Airtime

In a time before Kayleigh McEnany was the White House press secretary, she was a paid commentator who would sometimes appear on CNN and Fox Business.

She has publicly called Trump a “showman” who is “inauthentic”. But something happened in McEnany’s trajectory that landed her in the White House for a man who she, apparently, never thought to fulfill the role of a GOP president.

At one point in time, McEnany stood for human decency. Before Trump tapped her into the White House boxing ring, she called his comments on Mexican immigrants “racist”.

Before transferring to Harvard Law School she received advice about changing her attitude toward Trump. That advice involved her accepting Trump as the candidate for the Republican party.

And that is the beginning and the end of the Kayleigh McEnany consciousness as we know it.

Since then, she’s called Trump’s remarks about white supremacy one about “love and inclusiveness”. In 2019, she told Chris Cuomo that she doesn’t believe the president has ever lied. The Washington Post counts over 22,000, but maybe that’s just a weird way to say zero these days. She has called Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic his way of putting “America first, [and that] he will always protect American citizens”. Also a funny way of saying that 250,000 Americans are dead under his administration bolstered by false notions of safety and an unwillingness to tell people to simply put their masks on.

The rest of the world has called McEnany’s words an echo-chamber for Trumpism and his lies. She apparently likes to think they’re alternative facts.

In latest news, McEnany’s echoes seem to pedal on the theory that Trump was never actually legitimately accepted as the President. Hillary Clinton conceded the day after. It is now over two weeks and Trump not only refuses to concede but declared every few hours over Twitter that he actually won the election.

A piece of the Trump legacy will provide a lasting stain to each of the members he has interacted with. Whether that is the multiple press secretaries, or the lawyers that are now in federal prison, or the members of his cabinet he fired or quit. McEnany’s grab for airtime ultimately results in a credential-less future, filled with the gaslighting and the fake news conspiracies she has twisted and tossed around in exchange for a job.

She is right in her most recent press briefing. Trump’s response to this pandemic is definitely “unprecedented”. But it hasn’t saved any lives. America leads in covid deaths, and, like most things in Trumpism, almost everything has been unprecedented.

Tearing the underpinnings of democracy is unprecedented. Spewing lies about the election and voter fraud is unprecedented.

Hiring a press secretary to help balloon those lies into a press briefing room is probably the pinnacle of that humiliation.

We keep wondering whether this is the lowest America can go. We keep thinking that, at some point, there will be a course-correction for the better. Trump has been defeated, and, yet, it’s never felt scarier to watch an idiot like McEnany continue to spew unsubstantiated words into an audience that knows it’s fake news before she utters them.

It’s time for the swamp to actually be drained. It’s time for Trump and his friends to go away.