Bill Berkowitz: Kayleigh McEnany Trump’s Press Secretary Is Master of Misinformation
July 13th 2020
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany (The White House)
By Bill Berkowitz
During one of her recent press briefings, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany failed to even closely respond to numerous questions about Donald Trump’s tweets; one was related to NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, in which Trump told Wallace he should apologize for the noose discovered in his garage. McEnany deflected a question about whether Trump supports the shameful symbolic use of the Confederate flag, saying that hasn’t decided where he stands on that issue. At the same time, McEnany claimed that, “the world is looking at us as a leader in COVID-19.” With her briefing books at the ready, McEnany stands at the podium and bats away question after question from reporters.
“[McEnany’s] briefing is off the rails,” tweeted The New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman. “Doesn’t answer the question she’s repeatedly asked about the president saying Bubba Wallace should ‘apologize,’ then gets angry reporters are pressing her on it.”
“McEnany is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and given that elite academic understanding of the law, she should be focusing on providing facts and forthright answers to the media as press secretary,” Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash, told me in an email. “Unfortunately, daily she disregards the fact-based foundation of the law to duplicitously defend a president who opportunistically uses ‘law and order’ as a shield for disregarding the most fundamental truths. She is complicit with Trump in promoting a dangerous ‘alternative reality.’"
The central premise of Donald Trump’s Re-election campaign strategy is to do and say anything that will rile up his white nationalist base, while at the same time doing and saying anything that will appease his Christian evangelical supporters.
McEnany recently criticized the 5-4 Supreme Court decision striking down a restrictive Louisiana anti-abortion law, saying, “In an unfortunate ruling today, the Supreme Court devalued both the health of mothers and the lives of unborn children by gutting Louisiana’s policy that required all abortion procedures be performed by individuals with admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.”
She is the heir to the thrones of Sarah Sanders Huckabee and Sean Spicer, and what an heir she has become! With apparently all the confidence in the world, McEnany spins tales with the enthusiasm of a kid entering a candy store for the first time.
Her performances are impressive, in that she sticks to the Team Trump message like flies to flypaper; she does not give an inch. The Atlantic’s Emma Green pointed out that she “is a skillful steward of the covenant between the president and his religious supporters, openly suggesting that reporters stand among America’s enemies, no matter how much that may beggar belief” ().
McEnany is quite the scold. When replying to a reporter’s question about whether Trump’s desire to open churches during the coronavirus pandemic was safe, McEnany said that “It’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed,” Green reported.
McEnany has repeated Trump’s oft-used “fake news” meme in describing reports from the mainstream media. Most recently, she even stood at the podium and declared that Trump’s use of “kung flu” was not racist.
Green reported that “Her combativeness makes for spirited prime-time television, and reporters’ relentless questioning tees up dramatic YouTube clips of McEnany defending the president. She is as much a creature of Washington as her opponents: She spent the better part of the past decade mastering the immense D.C. ecosystem of Both Sides debate, and she’s managed to win many grudging admirers and friends in greenrooms up and down the Acela corridor. In the months before the 2016 election, she filled a niche on CNN, speaking on behalf of Trump supporters. Although on-air arguments with her could be fierce, several of her fellow contributors described off-set conversations with McEnany as cordial, like rival players for the Yankees and Red Sox chatting amiably after a game. ‘You can do a lot worse than Kayleigh McEnany,’ Paul Begala, one of the orchestrators of Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and himself a cable-news pundit, told me. ‘She’s terribly smart.’”
McAnany isn’t the only administration official and surrogate attempting to keep Trump’s Christian nationalist base intact. As The Atlantic’s Green noted out “Trump officials act as a roving band of apostles, evangelizing this message.” Several months back, Attorney General William Barr spoke at Notre Dame University, inveighing against the immoral left, maintaining that “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square.” The sometimes mask-less and sometime mask-wearing Vice president Mike Pence recently appeared at a megachurch in Texas and, although wearing a mask, listened to an obviously mask-less mega-choir. Before that, he told a graduating class at Liberty University to prepare to be “shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible.”
And beleaguered Trump campaign chairman Brad Parscale, tweeted that “only God could deliver such a savior to our nation,” along with a black-and-white photo of a Trump rally.