Up until recently, few conservative Republicans would have argued that Kayleigh McEnany was anything but a tough-as-nails, diehard Donald Trump loyalist during her time on the campaign trail for him and working in his administration. McEnany stood by him through what was arguably the toughest year of his presidency (2020-2021) and through the dark days of the Capitol riot and its aftermath when some on the right latched on to false but enduring media/Democrat narratives about how then-President Trump supposedly “incited” the riot.
But that was then, and this is now. In McEnany’s position as a co-host on the Fox News program “Outnumbered” and as an occasional guest host on other programs, McEnany, in my view, has tried to take an even-handed approach in her commentary. Presumably, she’s done this to spread her wings a bit politically speaking and so she won’t be viewed as simply repeating whatever Trump and his surrogates say on any given topic.
Occasionally, she has nice things to say about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week announced his presidential candidacy and, at this stage, is viewed as Trump’s biggest threat to win the nomination. For instance, back in February, she called him the “hottest governor in Republican politics” during a conversation she was having with her co-hosts about how the Republican presidential race was shaping up.
That apparently didn’t sit well with Trump, who questioned her loyalty in a late April post on Truth Social in response to her praising… Trump:
Fast forward a month later, and now Trump has completely disowned McEnany, trashing her Tuesday in another Truth Social post for the crime of allegedly misquoting poll numbers that showed his lead on DeSantis in Iowa was decreasing:
During a Fox News broadcast earlier in the day, McEnany said that DeSantis may be “closing the gap” in Iowa’s GOP primary race, although it was unclear which polls she was referencing. Trump insisted that McEnany had provided the “wrong poll numbers” while laying into her for supposedly promoting the Florida governor, whom he has taken to calling “Ron DeSanctimonious.””Kayleigh ‘Milktoast’ McEnany just gave out the wrong poll numbers on FoxNews,” Trump wrote. “I am 34 points up on DeSanctimonious, not 25 up. While 25 is great, it’s not 34. She knew the number was corrected upwards by the group that did the poll. The RINOS & Globalists can have her. FoxNews should only use REAL Stars!!!”Shortly before Trump’s post, McEnany said during an appearance on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime that the DeSantis campaign would argue it had “closed the gap by nine points since we announced in Iowa,” with Trump’s advantage in the Hawkeye State supposedly falling from 34 points to 25 points since the governor announced his candidacy last week.
“Milquetoast,” which is what Trump likely meant to type, means “timid, meek, or unassertive” according to the dictionary definition, and is a word that very few, even among McEnany’s many detractors in the Democrat party and the left-wing media would have ever used to describe her style.
Case in point:
What Trump left out was that McEnany indicated that the numbers still showed Trump “hugely” ahead and that, at one point, she was merely (and admittedly) summarizing the DeSantis campaign’s arguments about the polling:
McEnany, now a co-host on Fox’s “Outnumbered,” had only highlighted ever-changing polling numbers to reflect how “the DeSantis team would say we’ve just had polling come out that shows we’ve closed by nine points” in Iowa.“Still, Trump’s hugely ahead,” she said, again stressing that any suggestion that DeSantis is creeping up on him is “just their argument.”
Some have suggested McEnany did accurately quote the polling and that it’s Trump who got it wrong:
Also, during McEnany’s guest stint on the Ingraham Angle, she noted that the RCP average shows Trump “pretty much trouncing DeSantis” in Iowa. Perhaps Trump missed this segment as well:
Trump’s attack on McEnany sparked fierce debate on the Twitter machine between the warring camps, with some, including former Trump acting DNI Ric Grenell, claiming without evidence that McEnany was the first one to turn on Trump, not the other way around, so she deserved being cast off as a “RINO Globalist”:
My .02 on this is that I think it’s inarguable that McEnany was one of Trump’s biggest and most unapologetic defenders during her time as his press secretary, and even afterward. But beyond that, what’s most concerning to me about the “disloyalty” argument is that Trump used it on DeSantis before he declared his candidacy, suggesting he was being “disloyal” for considering jumping in, as though the nomination belonged to Trump already.
Needless to say, that’s not how any of this is supposed to work. We have presidential nomination battles so the voters in their respective political parties can directly say who they think is best to represent them in the general election and to preside over the country. To insinuate there should be some sort of coronation before that is, in my opinion, unseemly, and kind of reminds me of how Hillary Clinton and her campaign surrogates viewed her Democratic primary opponents, Barack Obama especially, in 2007-2008 – and again in 2016 with her/their treatment of Bernie Sanders.
As to what Trump’s attacks on Kayleigh McEnany do or do not say about Trump, I’ll leave that to readers to debate.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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