A Former Pro-Trump CNN Personality Is Now Spreading 'Real News' on Trump TV

Jack Holmes
Updated

From Esquire

Kayleigh McEnany, one of the people CNN paid to defend Donald Trump through every-and we mean every-indefensible episode, was quietly let go from the network recently. Perhaps CNN decided it preferred the stylings of Jeffrey Lord, who has the unmitigated gall to frequently reference leaders of the Civil Rights Movement while defending the current president, like when he called Trump "the Martin Luther King of healthcare." Whatever the reason, McEnany's days spouting pro-Trump mumbo-jumbo on the airwaves are over-or are they?

With her resume-McEnany studied at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, Oxford, and Harvard Law School-she was always likely to land on her feet, and she has. She just happened to settle on Trump TV:

Now, the production value on this is a little crude. The editing is a bit bumpy and the graphics are sitting on top of her shoulder. But there's no mistake: This is meant to be a newscast, except it only reports news with positive implications for the president and his agenda, calling it "Real News." The implication, then, is that the other news you hear-where the president's legislative agenda is in a perpetual state of ignominious collapse, he's holding train-wreck phone calls with the leaders of some of our closest allies, and a Justice Department investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia seems to ramp up by the day-that's all fake. Instead, let's just hear about the jobs numbers. All is well!

Brian Stelter, a former colleague of McEnany's whose Sunday show on CNN, Reliable Sources, focuses on auditing the media, empaneled a couple of commentators to discuss this development. The consensus was that this appears to be a campaign operation. Meaning, it's either Trump's reelection campaign (which kicked off 29 days into his presidency) or the Republican National Committee-not the government-who's producing Trump TV. If it's just campaign messaging, they agreed, it's nothing we haven't seen before:

But is there really a functional difference in terms of how viewers interpret this when it's produced by the president's campaign instead of the White House itself? Certainly it would be even more of a concern if this messaging were paid for by the government, but this is still an attempt to circumvent independent media (that is, the free press) and present an alternative set of facts to a viewing public who may or may not know the difference. This bares similarities to the problem presented by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is now presenting pro-Trump propaganda to millions of Americans each day as if it is standard local news, like traffic and the weather.

Except this is coming from a source far closer to the president himself. There was concern about the prospect of a Trump TV network if he'd lost the election, and it seems we may get one even after he won. That's surely in part why the president's reelection campaign began essentially as soon as he entered office. If nothing else, it presented the opportunity to keep holding rallies where those still cheering Trump's name could be assembled to do just that in a public setting. The line between governing and campaigning has been blurring for years, but this is a new level of fog. Whoever's paying for it, this has the look of State TV, something that former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul echoed on Twitter:

Even if you don't have a problem with this setup, it does seem to present an opportunity for the ever-growing ecosystem of reactionary pro-Trump media personalities. That's everyone from the YouTube vloggers of the far right to Sean Hannity. Who will join McEnany next on Trump TV? Anyone, we can assume, willing to champion the erosion of democratic norms while yelling about freedom.

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