White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany went out on Friday afternoon to remind everyone why we cannot trust a thing this White House says about Donald Trump having COVID-19. Speaking to reporters, McEnany refused to give any detailed information about the timeline of Trump and others around him testing positive, or about Trump’s current condition beyond that he was having “mild symptoms.”
“He is hard at work, we’re having to slow him down a little bit,” McEnany said. “He’s been on the phone with Sen. McConnell, Sen. Lindsey Graham, been on the phone with chief of staff Mark Meadows.” What’s particularly interesting about this is that the one thing on Trump’s public schedule for Friday was a phone call about coronavirus—and Mike Pence took his place on it. If he’s so hard at work, specifically talking on the phone, why couldn’t he participate in that phone call?
Asked why Trump went to a fundraiser in New Jersey on Thursday after learning that Hope Hicks, a top aide with whom he’d been working closely and unmasked, had tested positive, McEnany claimed “It was deemed safe for the president to go. He socially distanced, it was an outdoor event and it was deemed safe by White House operations for him to attend that event.”
Who assessed that, now? “White House operations made the assessment it was safe for the president in consultation with others.” Okay … but I have questions. It was safe for Trump, but was it safe for the people he potentially exposed to the virus? Who were the “others” consulted? Were they experts on public health, or on the necessity of Trump raising money for his broke-ass campaign?
McEnany, who walked away extremely briskly after that last answer, was also lying. The large fundraiser on Thursday was outdoors, but CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that there was also a smaller indoor event with Trump, who was not wearing a mask. One of the attendees of the fundraiser, which had tickets that cost up to $250,000, told reporters that 19 people were at a 45-minute private meeting with Trump.
So we know McEnany lied about one important part of what she told reporters, and we have no particular reason to believe any of the rest of it. That’s about what we expect of this White House, and going forward it’s reasonable to assume that anything we hear about Trump’s condition or the chain of events around him contracting COVID-19 is false unless proven otherwise.