Donald Trump’s new press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has a whole new problem
One of the reasons Donald Trump has had such trouble hiring competent people is that even most Republican operatives think he’s a scumbag and a joke. Some of them are unscrupulous enough that they’ve been willing to go to work for him anyway. The trouble is that some of them stated their feelings about him out loud before going to work for him.
This brings us to Donald Trump’s new White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Thus far she’s done two press briefings. The first one went pretty well for her, thanks in part to softball questions from reporters. The second one went quite poorly for her, as reporters brought tougher questions, and she walked out after getting one she didn’t like. Of course Trump isn’t going to judge her on her competence, but rather on her loyalty – and that brings us to a new problem for her.
Back in 2015, Kayleigh McEnany went on television and called Donald Trump a “racist” and an “inauthentic” Republican, among some other negative things. This on its own isn’t necessarily a problem for her; other Trump advisers like Kellyanne Conway said far worse about him before going to work for him. The trouble for McEnany is that the media is now forcing the issue by giving significant coverage to the fact that McEnany said these things about Trump.
It’s one thing for Donald Trump to know that Kayleigh McEnany’s past ugly comments about him are out there. Trump and/or his team probably knew about these comments before they hired her. It’s another thing for Trump to have to suffer the humiliation of seeing cable news outlets broadcasting McEnany’s past comments about him. We’ll see if that humiliation gets to him, and if it impacts his willingness to let her keep working for him. He’s already on his fourth White House Press Secretary; why not move on to a fifth one?
