Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany confounded critics Tuesday when she claimed the nation did not see “crisis after crisis” under former President Donald Trump, who was impeached twice and oversaw the management of a devastating coronavirus pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
During a conversation on Fox News about President Joe Biden’s plunge in approval ratings amid the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and a surge in COVID-19 infections driven by the delta variant of the virus, McEnany tried to rewrite history about his predecessor.
“We are eight months into a Biden presidency,” she said. “Wrap your head around that. We still have three years and four months left.”
“Look, when President Trump was president, you didn’t see crisis after crisis. You just didn’t see it,” she added.
“I shudder to think about what COVID would have been like under Joe Biden.”
Under Trump, more than 400,000 people died in the U.S. of COVID-19, a figure that epidemiologists predicted could have been much lower if mitigation measures had been enforced earlier. But in the early stages of the pandemic, when experts were sounding the alarm, Trump was denying the reality of the pandemic and comparing the coronavirus to “the common flu.” He was impeached in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and again in 2021 for inciting a violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. The Senate did not vote to convict Trump in either impeachment case.
The reaction to her revisionist account was swift and severe Tuesday: