Kayleigh McEnany

Kayleigh Michelle McEnany (; born April 18, 1988) is an American political commentator, media personality, and former political spokesperson who served as the 33rd White House press secretary during the first Trump administration from 2020 to 2021.

Early in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, she was a critic of Donald Trump but over time became one of his staunchest defenders. In 2017, she was appointed national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. She worked for the Trump 2020 presidential campaign as national press secretary from 2019 to 2020 and again as senior advisor from October 2020 to January 2021.

McEnany began her media career as a producer for Huckabee on Fox News. She later worked as a commentator on CNN. Following her time in the Trump administration, she became an on-air contributor for Fox News and serves as a co-host of Outnumbered and host of Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany. She is also a primary guest host for The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, The Five, and Fox & Friends.

Early life and education

McEnany was born and raised in Tampa, Florida. She is the daughter of commercial roofing company owner Michael and Leanne McEnany. She also has a younger sister, Ryann McEnany. McEnany attended the Academy of the Holy Names, a private Catholic preparatory school in Tampa. After graduating, she majored in international politics at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., and she studied abroad at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. While at Oxford, she was taught politics by future British Labour politician Nick Thomas-Symonds. After graduating from Georgetown in 2010, McEnany spent three years as a producer on the Mike Huckabee Show.

McEnany attended the University of Miami School of Law for her first (1L) year before transferring to Harvard Law School. At the Miami School of Law, McEnany received the Bruce J. Winick Award for Excellence, a scholarship awarded to students in the top 1% of their class. She graduated from Harvard in 2016.

Career

As a college student, McEnany interned for several politicians, including Tom Gallagher, Adam Putnam and George W. Bush, and later worked in the White House Office of Communications, where she wrote media briefings.

Media roles

While in law school, McEnany appeared on CNN as a paid commentator. She supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In early 2015, before becoming a Trump supporter, McEnany was highly critical of him, declaring on CNN and Fox Business that "Donald Trump has shown himself to be a showman" and it was "unfortunate" and "inauthentic" to call him a Republican. McEnany called his comments about Mexican immigrants "racist". According to Michael Marcantonio, a fellow summer associate at a law firm, she began supporting Trump after accepting Marcantonio's advice, which he gave to her over cocktails. In an interview with the New York Times, Marcantonio recalled telling McEnany, "Donald Trump is going to be your nominee," and that if "a smart, young, blond Harvard graduate" wanted "to get on television and have a career as a political pundit, you would be wise to be an early backer."

On August 5, 2017, McEnany left her position at CNN. The following day, she hosted a 90-second webcast, Real News Update on Trump's personal Facebook page. She praised Trump throughout the segment, saying she had brought the "real news" to the American people.

Former employer Mike Huckabee has called her a "meticulous researcher" and "extraordinarily prepared." Her rapid occupational success was noted by Van Jones, who worked with her at CNN: "I'm not trying to defend the messaging, but what I hope people can acknowledge is there's very few people in either party who can accomplish what Kayleigh has accomplished in such a short time... People keep taking her lightly, and they keep regretting it."

Republican political strategist

McEnany has been closely associated with the Republican Party since she was in college. She was critical of the Obama presidency, and in 2012 posted several tweets questioning Barack Obama's birthplace, echoing the "birther" conspiracy theorist movement. In 2012, McEnany tweeted about Obama's half-brother Malik Obama, who lives in Kenya: "How I Met Your Brother – Never mind, forgot he's still in that hut in Kenya".

In 2017, she said it was hypocritical to accuse President Trump of spending time playing golf when Obama had done the same thing after the 2002 beheading of Daniel Pearl. McEnany later apologized for the comment, acknowledging that Obama was a senator at the time although he did go golfing after the 2014 beheading of another journalist, James Foley, by ISIS in Syria. Obama, who was vacationing on Martha's Vineyard at the time, admitted that he should have "anticipated the optics" of golfing immediately after making a press statement on Foley's death.

On August 7, 2017, the Republican National Committee (RNC) appointed McEnany as its national spokesperson. In 2017, as RNC spokeswoman, McEnany supported Trump amid a bipartisan backlash in response to his comments about a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which he suggested that white supremacists and anti-racist counterprotesters shared blame for violence; in a tweet, McEnany wrote that the Republican Party supported Trump's "message of love and inclusiveness."

In August 2019, after The Washington Post reported that Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading statements in his first three years in office, McEnany told CNN's Chris Cuomo: "I don't believe the president has lied."

In the weeks before her appointment as White House press secretary, McEnany praised Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, "This president will always put America first, he will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism, and isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of Barack Obama?" The disease had been present in the United States for at least a month prior to McEnany's claim that the virus would not "come here"; in December 2020 Politico named McEnany's prediction one of "the most audacious, confident and spectacularly incorrect prognostications about the year". In March 2020, McEnany said Democrats were trying "to politicize" the coronavirus and that Democrats were almost "rooting for this outcome."

In the weeks following, McEnany was criticized for her remarks. Author Grant Stern tweeted, "Kayleigh McEnany is coming to the White House with new 'alternative facts' about #coronavirus. The rest of the world calls them lies." McEnany responded that she was referring to Trump's travel ban.

White House press secretary (2020–2021)

After Mark Meadows replaced Mick Mulvaney as White House chief of staff in April 2020, Meadows's first personnel change was hiring McEnany as White House press secretary on April 7, 2020, which was officially announced the next day. Stephanie Grisham, who had served in the role and as White House communications director since June 2019, became First Lady Melania Trump's chief of staff and spokesperson.

Two months into her tenure, the Associated Press wrote of McEnany, she "has made clear from her first briefing that she's willing to defend her boss's view of himself as well as his most flagrant misstatements."

In April 2020, McEnany defended Trump's assertion that the World Health Organization had shown a "clear bias towards China" and said that the WHO put Americans at risk by "repeating inaccurate claims peddled by China during the coronavirus pandemic" and "opposing the United States' life-saving travel restrictions."

On May 1, 2020, as part of her first public press briefing and the first one by a White House press secretary in 417 days, McEnany was asked by an Associated Press reporter: "Will you pledge to never lie to us from that podium?" McEnany replied: "I will never lie to you. You have my word on that." On the subject of Trump's responses to the coronavirus pandemic, she claimed, "This president has always sided on the side of data". In response to allegations of Trump's sexual misconduct, McEnany said: "He has always told the truth." McEnany falsely claimed that the Mueller Report as part of the larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election had resulted in a "complete and total exoneration of President Trump," despite the report reading "Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."