During a Sunday morning appearance on CNN, the network’s Jake Tapper explained to fellow host Brian Stelter that he’s “just not going to put somebody like” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on the air, because McEnany “lies the way that… most people breathe” and “can’t acknowledge reality.” Despite the ample documentation of the many lies that McEnany has told, the top Trump official took serious issue with Tapper’s characterization on Twitter. Among other comments, McEnany insisted that she does “not lie,” which is just laughable. The level of self-delusion that she has to maintain in order to put this nonsense out into the world is simply staggering.
Referring to a clip of Tapper’s comments, McEnany self-confidently commented as follows:
‘This is a therapy session for a broken network, and @jaketapper is lazy enough to participate by lobbing baseless personal attacks, with ZERO evidence. Jake’s real problem: I do not leak. I do not lie. But I DO call out the lies of the media (i.e. CNN Russia collusion hoax!)’
This is a therapy session for a broken network, and @jaketapper is lazy enough to participate by lobbing baseless personal attacks, with ZERO evidence.
Jake’s real problem:
I do not leak.
I do not lie.
But I DO call out the lies of the media (i.e. CNN Russia collusion hoax!) https://t.co/Gz0RWbwhJZ
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) December 27, 2020
The observation that McEnany lies all the time is not a “baseless personal attack.” Right there in the tweet in which McEnany claims that she does “not lie,” she pushes a falsehood. She referred to the “Russia collusion hoax,” but there is no such thing as the “Russia collusion hoax” to which McEnany is referring. Russian interference in the U.S. electoral process and the Trump campaign’s interest in benefiting from this interference are both well-documented facts. Special Counsel Robert Mueller ended his Russia investigation by concluding that no criminally prosecutable conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian meddlers had occurred, but this conclusion wasn’t because of a lack of trying!
Among other examples, at one point during the 2016 campaign season, Trump openly called on Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Hillary Clinton. Trump subsequently claimed that, in their reporting on the incident, media outlets cut out follow-up moments in which people laughed and clearly established the comment as a supposed joke — but the entire event was on the video, and no one — including Trump! — laughed. “Jokey” attempted collusion is still attempted collusion!
Besides, the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia go well on from there. Ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort once shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, who’s tied to Russian intelligence. On another occasion, Donald Trump Jr. eagerly met with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton and the Democrats.
McEnany’s misrepresentations of reality cover plenty of topics besides the Russia scandal. Once, she claimed that Trump “never downplayed the virus,” which is false. Over and over, Trump has attempted to blame high U.S. testing levels for the perceived surges of COVID-19 in the country, obviously attempting to downplay the situation. In reality, as those COVID-19 case numbers that Trump tried to dismiss grew across the country, so did hospitalizations and deaths. Separately, McEnany has pretended like there’s a legitimate chance of Trump securing a second term in office, which is simply ridiculous. There is zero meaningful evidence of systematic election fraud swinging the election to Biden.
