White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany really went for it during her press briefing Thursday. I’m not exactly sure what “it” was but I do know she was giving it her all.
Here are some of the terrible things she said today:
“Science should not stand in the way of” opening schools.
When asked what Donald Trump would say to parents who have children in school districts that are planning to go online-only in the fall and don’t know how to navigate that, McEnany responded: “The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open … And when he says open, he means open in full, kids been able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.”
Then in the same breath she goes on to quote former Stanford Neuroradiology Chief/regular Fox News presence Dr. Scott Atlas, who says “the science is on our side,” so I guess the science isn’t going to stand in their way because their approach is to ignore science entirely until one person says one thing that benefits them, then base their entire plan on that.
2/ Before the familiar voices jump on this to score whatever political points they want, the facts are also clear that the president has ignored science and health experts far too many times and the US response is empirically a failure compared to the rest of the Western world.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 16, 2020
She snapped over the Hatch Act.
A reporter asked her if there is “any place in the White House where you think politics is inappropriate and where do you draw the line?”. He specifically cited a campaign meeting last month and this week’s bizarre unofficial campaign rally Trump held for reporters in the Rose Garden.
McEnany jumped to a prepared statement on how Trump didn’t violate the Hatch Act because that act, which prohibits federal employees from political campaigning, doesn’t apply to the president or vice president. And while that’s technically true, as the reporter jumped in to say, that wasn’t the question. And that’s when McEnany gets testy.
The reporter interrupted to say his question has nothing to do with the Hatch Act. With her trademark tone of disdain and dead dagger-eyes, she shot back, “It has everything to do with this. Go read the Hatch Act! That’s what you’re alleging is problematic for the president.” (Again, it wasn’t.)
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2020
“But what your real problem was,” she snipped, “was the fact that the president gave a very good, powerful speech from the Rose Garden.” Neat. I wonder what she thinks about those unofficial bean ads.
She accidentally made a great case for vote-by-mail.
When asked about a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina who was accused of illegally collecting and completing absentee ballots (that thing Trump keeps saying Democrats will do), she responded by saying she wasn’t familiar with that case but flipped in her binder to some talking points on voter fraud that I don’t think make the point she was trying to make.
In addition to mentioning a USPS truck that caught fire as some sort of malicious impediment to voting, she had this to say about “rampant voter fraud”: “In 2016, as the president has noted, about 1 percent of absentee ballots nationwide were thrown out and it could be much higher this year as many people vote by mail for the first time,” McEnany said. “That’s one of the flaws with mass mail-in voting.”
As the Washington Post writes:
So … how’s that a flaw? If the argument is that 1-in-100 ballots are thrown out as suspect or invalid, that seems like the system working as it should? Don’t we want ballots that don’t pass the smell test to be rejected? Is it better if no ballots are rejected?
But McEnany wasn’t the only person in the Trump administration to say wacky things today.
When asked about how to safely reopen schools and what the plan for that is, Betsy DeVos tried (and failed) to do some major semantics gymnastics:
Isn’t planning for something that hasn’t happened yet the literal definition of planning ..?……? https://t.co/8a9mLgXuVi
— Kylie Cheung (@kylietcheung) July 16, 2020
And finally, there was … whatever the hell this was:
It’s time for the daily Trump rally at the White House https://t.co/T9osHSBDYr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2020
(image: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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