In a shocking turn of events, Donald Trump’s latest media fabulist, Kayleigh McEnany, who kicked off her new job by telling a whopper to assembled reporters in the White House Press Room (“I will never lie to you”), and who has spent the rest of her tenure to date padding President Trump’s resume of 20,000-plus lies since he assumed office, told the truth today.
“After testing negative consistently, including every day since Thursday, I tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday morning,” she wrote, adding in a statement posted to Twitter. that she was “experiencing no symptoms.”
It’s not known of course whether the second part of her statement was or is correct, as it is only her own word about symptoms, and perhaps the test result wasn’t actually provided to her this morning, but earlier. But at least it does appear that a woman some Washington scribes have dubbed McInany, is telling the truth about the result of the test.
Journalists who have been dealing with McEnany’s endless stream of falsehoods since she assumed the job of Trump lie purveyor in April of this year, were not surprised to hear that this woman who had faithfully been adhering to her boss’s admonition to White House staff to eschew masks had contracted the Coronavirus. After all, they knew she had participated in President Trump’s pre-Biden debate rehearsal with former NJ Governor Chris Christie and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That virus-plagued session occurred just days before Christie announced that he was entering a hospital in his home state after testing positive for the disease. But they were surprised by her sudden forthrightness in apparently immediately notifying them and the public of her infectiousness.
McEnany, whose two deputies in the press office also tested positive today, may of course not have been all that forthright, since she clearly spread within her office the disease she likely caught early last week, and may have known sooner about her possibly being a Covid spreader.
But given her shocking truthiness today, perhaps she is capable of speaking forthrightly after all.
There is some speculation now in the wake of this shocking news, that one of the symptoms of Covid-19 infection may turn out to be self-reflection among people who seem to lack it otherwise. In that case, perhaps McEnany and even President Trump — now respectively quarantined and in the latter’s case hospitalized with what by varying accounts is a just mild “flash” case of the disease or alternatively a serious case that could continue to worsen over the rest of the week — could stun the nation by suddenly spouting truths instead of patent falsehoods.
It may be a bit late in the campaign but then again, if the president and his spokeswoman began suddenly talking honestly with the media and the public, the phenomenon could shake up the campaign significantly in the remaining four weeks before Nov. 3, putting the badly sinking Trump back in the race.
A good start would be for McEnany to level with reporters and the American public about both when President Trump first tested positive for Covid-19, and with the course of and current prognosis for his Coronavirus case.
Trump could then follow up himself with an abject apology for his months of failure to take the pandemic seriously and an announcement that instead of supporting a lawsuit to eliminate Obamacare, he is submitting a bill to Congress to make all Americans of any age eligible for full Medicare part A, B and D coverage until the pandemic ends.
COMMENTS