Donald Trump’s homophobic press secretary Kayleigh McEnany caught out in spectacularly blatant lie
Kayleigh McEnany speaks at a “Keep America Great” campaign rally on January 9, 2020 (Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire/ Getty)
Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump’s new press secretary who opposes equal marriage and trans-inclusive bathrooms, has been caught out in a lie about election fraud.
Trump welcomed his new White House press secretary, a combative TV pundit with a long history of anti-LGBT+ comments, last month.
McEnany has previously worked as Trump’s spokesperson for his re-election campaign and as a pro-Trump commentator on CNN during the 2016 presidential election.
The LGBT+ advocacy group GLAAD has compiled a list of her most egregious comments, which include opposing a bill to ban conversion therapy and repeatedly framing the issue of transgender bathroom access as a “predatory” threat to women and girls.
McEnany has previously argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality is a threat to religious rights, and described late justice Antonin Scalia’s criticism of a pro-marriage equality ruling as “awesome“.
This week, president Trump took aim at mail-in ballots, falsely claiming that they would be “substantially fraudulent” and result in a “rigged election”.
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
However, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Trump’s statements were completely false.
There have been around 250 million ballots cast by mail since 2000, and in 2016 and 2018, around 25 per cent of Americans who voted did so by mail.
Bar codes on ballots allow for tracking, validation and avoiding duplicate votes.
Figures from Oregon, which has sent out more than 100 million vote-by-mail ballots since 2000 found that fraud occurred in just 0.0000001 percent of all votes cast.
Kayleigh McEnany tried to defend Donald Trump’s election fraud tweets, but it backfired spectacularly.
Donald Trump’s false claims about mail-in voting were fact-checked by many publications, and even Twitter itself, but Kayleigh McEnany was still quick to defend her boss.
? Get the facts about mail-in ballots!
Will the media, and @Twitter, acknowledge these real concerns with mass mail-in voting?
THREAD ⬇️— Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) May 26, 2020
However despite her apparent hatred of mail-in ballots, McEnany, from Tampa, has voted by mail in every Florida election she has participated in since 2010, according to Tampa Bay Times.
After the publication reviewed her voting history, McEnany gave a statement attempting to explain why she had voted by mail 11 times in the last ten years if she was against mail-in ballots.
She said: “Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person.
“President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicise the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”
Unfortunately, her excuse didn’t quite work as Florida does not have absentee voting, and anyone can vote by mail for any reason.
