She still looks like the blonde cheerleader she was back in her Tampa high school a dozen years ago. Now, Kayleigh McEnany is head cheerleader in the country, a pom-pom girl for the most outrageous and dangerous man in America.
As Donald Trump’s latest press secretary — the fourth in three years — McEnany is tasked with lying for a living and cheering on whatever crazy emanates from the Trump White House, most recently the suggestion that drinking bleach could cure COVID-19.
No member of Trump’s inner circle gets welcomed without a resume that includes public admiration for Trump as well as an abiding commitment to racism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia. McEnany checks all the boxes. She is an equal opportunity bigot.
When not cracking jokes on Twitter promoting the false GOP narrative that former President Obama was born in Kenya, McEnany has pushed a myriad of false narratives about LGBTQ people from “bathroom panic” to claims that accepting gay marriage would lead to embracing bestiality.
A born hater, McEnany has never met a well-known homophobe she didn’t like. She has defended Mike Pence and written articles in conservative publications giving vigorous counter-arguments to Obergefell and other pro-gay civil rights law.
A petite blonde Bond villain, McEnany, 31, got her start interning in the George W. Bush White House and rose to become part of the White House communications department. She then got a gig at Fox News, working as a producer for infamous homophobe Gov. Mike Huckabee.
But unlike Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the position of press secretary longer than anyone, McEnany is ultra-smart and has the resume to prove it. With degrees from Georgetown University and Oxford and a law degree from Harvard, McEnany can spin alternative facts with the best.
And spin she does. McEnany said prior to the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling that discrimination against same-sex marriage was nothing more than “farcical blabber.” She has written extensively that the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality is a threat to religious rights and declared that the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s rabid rebuttal of marriage equality was “awesome.”
Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage, McEnany agreed with right-wing religious zealot Rev. Pat Robertson, when he said gay people will “make Americans conform to them.”
You know — the alleged gay agenda he’s been touting since before McEnany was born.
Robertson said on his “700 Club” TV show, “You’re gonna say that you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some abhorrent thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.”
McEnany defended Robertson’s comments on the Dr. Drew Show on Fox. “I wouldn’t have chosen the same verbiage as Pat Robertson,” McEnany told Dr. Drew, “but he’s making a point about religious liberty and how there’s going to be an infringement upon it because of what came out of the Supreme Court,” she said.
McEnany added, “Robertson largely articulated the same rationale we heard from Chief Justice Roberts, and he’s exactly right.”
McEnany has also dismissed VP Pence’s long and disturbing history of homophobia while on CNN, telling openly gay anchor Don Lemon that “Mike Pence loves all people.”
Pence loved them into what the CDC described as a mini-HIV epidemic in Indiana when he was governor.
McEnany also supports conversion therapy, the brutal anti-LGBTQ pseudo-science that is still legal in most states. She has been a guest on the nationally syndicated radio show hosted by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. FRC has been deemed a hate group by the watchdog agency Southern Poverty Law Center.
McEnany appeared on the same episode as Ken Williams, co-founder of the so-called “ex-gay” resource group Equipped to Love, who spoke in opposition to a California bill seeking to outlaw conversion therapy.
Among her regular screeds is “bathroom panic.” McEnany contends that transgender bathroom access is dangerous on the basis that “that this could be utilized by some men, for instance, to go into female bathrooms, it’s happened at Target, which does have the same policy in place. Voyeurism issues where cameras were put by men taking advantage of the policies, not transgender individuals, men, straight men coming in and really being a predator against women.”
McEnany’s unlikely enablers were Democratic strategists Van Jones and Donna Brazile. The former lauded her intellect and showed her the ropes at CNN, where she was a pundit during the 2016 election defending Trump as the spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. According to the New York Times, on April 28, it was Brazile who first hooked McEnany up with Trump.
Brutal irony.
GLAAD has taken on McEnany’s appointment. “Throughout her career, Kayleigh McEnany has used her role as a commentator to attack LGBTQ people through the press,” GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “Whether it be her opposition to marriage equality or her attacks on transgender people, McEnany has shown that she knows how to, and even enjoys, using the media to spread dangerous, anti-LGBTQ messages to wide audiences. Unfortunately, in her new role as Press Secretary, she will have the power to continue doing so, but now with the White House name attached to hers.”
It’s a marriage made in homophobic hell.