Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted on Tuesday night that the United States “didn’t see crisis after crisis” under former President Donald Trump, a strange claim considering the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died from a crippling pandemic during Trump’s tenure.
Largely due to the summer resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic and his handling of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has seen his once sturdy job approval numbers plunge in recent weeks. A new USA Today poll, for instance, gave Biden only a 41 percent total approval rating, down from 60 percent in the previous survey.
After pro-Trump host Jesse Watters claimed Biden was hoping Americans would just move on to another “news cycle” once the Afghanistan withdrawal deadline passes, he said the chaotic evacuation would “be a big dark cloud” hanging “over his head.” He also asserted that Biden was dealing with multiple other crises, such as rising crime and “open borders.”
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McEnany, meanwhile, spun a revisionist tale that America was essentially problem-free under the previous administration in which she served.
“We are eight months into a Biden presidency, Jesse,” she declared. “Wrap your head around that. We still have three years and four months left.”
Then, with a straight face, she added: “Look, when President Trump was president, you didn’t see crisis after crisis. You just didn’t see it!”
McEnany went on to praise Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic—which resulted in nearly a half-million dead Americans—before credulously stating that we wouldn’t “have seen Afghanistan blow up” under Trump’s leadership.
Unsaid by McEnany, of course, is that the Trump administration negotiated the peace deal with the Taliban that prompted the withdrawal of American troops in the first place. (Biden actually extended the deadline of the withdrawal from Trump’s initial May 1 due date.) Trump also arranged for the release of thousands of Taliban prisoners from Afghan jails prior to the withdrawal.
While the deadly pandemic and its additional impact on the nation’s economy was the major crisis overtaking the final year of Trump’s presidency, the ex-president also careened from crisis to crisis of his own making, resulting in Trump becoming the only president in history to be impeached twice.
In fact, Trump left office in disgrace after inciting a seditious mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s electoral victory, based on baseless lies that the election was “stolen” from him via widespread fraud.
McEnany, who spent the final weeks of Trump’s presidency helping him peddle the “Big Lie” that the election was rigged, sparked internal backlash at Fox after the network hired her earlier this year. Due to her reputation as a known and frequent liar, one Fox News insider called her a “mini-Goebbels whose incessant lies from the White House helped incite an insurrection” while another staffer likened her hiring to Fox “selling their souls and integrity to the devil.”
