Kayleigh McEnany (18 April 1988-) was White House Press Secretary from 7 April 2020 to 20 January 2021, succeeding Stephanie Grisham and preceding Jen Psaki.
Biography[]
Kayleigh McEnany was born in Tampa, Florida in 1988, the daughter of a commercial roofing company owner. She was a producer on the Mike Huckabee Show for three years before becoming a Republican political intern and a media briefing writer at the White House Office of Communications. In 2012, she promoted the racist "birther" conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama's birthplace. McEnany went on to become a CNN political commentator, and, while she was not initially a supporter of Donald Trump - calling his remarks about Mexican immigrants "racist" and suggesting that he was an "inauthentic" Republican, she went on to support him at the 2016 presidential election and became a staunchly pro-Trump commentator. She went on to become a Republican political strategist, and she defended Trump in the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally and praised his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In April 2020, she replaced Stephanie Grisham as White House Press Secretary, and, while she initially promised to never lie to the press, she made a number of false claims in the same briefing, including that Trump had always sided with the scientific data during the pandemic. She also claimed that voting by mail would result in the majority of the mailed-in votes coming from illegal immigrants or dead people, and she defended Trump's use of smoke canisters, pepper balls, riot shields, and police force to clear the way for a photo op at St. John's Church in Washington DC on 1 June 2020 amid nationwide racial justice protests. On 5 October 2020, she tested positive for COVID-19, with many other senior Trump administration personnel (including Trump) testing positive that same week. She left office in January 2021 following Trump's election defeat, and she was succeeded by Joe Biden's Press Secretary, Jen Psaki.