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President Trump just got a 4th press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who is replacing Stephanie Grisham—the press secretary that never held an actual press briefing.
The other press secretaries might have left, but their pasts can’t be forgotten—especially since many of them have been caught lying one too many times.
Here’s a recap of some of the worst lies that Trump’s press secretaries have told:
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Sarah Huckabee left the White House in 2019. The longer she was press secretary though, the more it became clear that she was more concerned with spreading Trump propaganda than with being a press secretary.
Journalists started getting so frustrated with her that a White House reporter told Politico that “Credibility issues are just getting more obvious and reporters are getting really frustrated with it and it’s causing tension.”
Here are some of her most outrageous lies:
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In a briefing in June 2018 about Trump’s separation policy, Sanders claimed that there have been laws allowing children to be separated from parents “for over a decade.” However, there have never been laws stating this.
She also defended the policy, “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” but even this does not seem right as Leviticus 19:33-34 says “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt” according to Refinery 29.
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After the terrorist attack in NYC in October 2017, Trump said the suspect came to the country by the diversity visa program, a program that allows people from countries with low rates of immigration to come to the US.
Sanders stated that the immigrants who come to the US through the diversity visa program aren’t vetted, even though they are.
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In June 2017, Sanders said Trump has “in no way, form, or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence,” after Trump promoted violence multiple times.
After numerous occasions at rally’s that involved protestors, Trump’s true feelings about violence came around.
In a North Carolina rally in March 2016, a protestor tried to storm the stage and was sucker-punched in the face when being escorted out. Trump responded by saying “The audience hit back and that’s what we need a little bit more of,” and that “they used to treat them very, very rough, and when they protested once, they would not do it again so easily.”
Trump has also said in response to a protestor at a Nevada rally that “I’d like to punch him in the face,” and in a St. Louis rally he said “You know, part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?” he explained.”
Huckabee is out of office, but the outrageous lengths she went without checking her facts to defend the President, will not be forgotten.
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Sean Spicer resigned in 2017 after disagreeing with Trump’s decision to appoint Anthony Scaramucci as the new communications director, but his lies will never be forgotten.
Here are some of the worst:
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Spicer outrageously told reporters in April 2019 that Hitler “didn’t even sink to the level of using chemical weapons. … He was not using the gas on his own people the same way that (Bashar al-)Assad is doing.” However, it doesn’t take common sense for someone to know that Nazis were known for pumping hydrogen cyanide gas into chambers to kill victims.
According to Politifact, Spicer seemed to be trying to refer to “chemicals” as only the ones ‘dropped from planes or fired through cannons’ and Chemical Weapons Convention’s definition of chemical weapons certainly makes Spicer seem to try to limit the true definition:
a) Toxic chemicals and their precursors, except where intended for purposes not prohibited under this Convention, as long as the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes.
Hopefully, Spicer should realize making not only false claims but referencing Hitler of all people is probably the worst thing for someone’s reputation as he Spicer was massively condemned for making the statement. When he apologized later, he said he “mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison,” in a report from the Guardian.
Barack Obama Presidential Library
In CNN’s State of the Union in July 2014, Spicer said, “In the last three years alone, 13 times, the Supreme Court, unanimously, 9-0, including all of the president’s liberal picks, have struck down the president’s executive orders.”
Republican Bob Goodlatte had made a similar claim that the Supreme Court decision in National Labor Relations Board vs.Noel Canning was “the 13th time the Supreme Court has voted 9-0 that the president has exceeded his constitutional authority,” which was later proven to be wrong by PolitiFact, who found that 9 of the 13 cases Goodlatte used actually originated when Bush was in office and that only one of the cases really actually involved Obama.
In the NLRB vs. Noel Canning, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Obama’s decision to appoint members to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate wasn’t ‘technically’ in session, but this still did not relate to Spicer’s claim of the court unanimously rejecting Obama’s “executive orders” 13 times, as none of the cases specifically involved executive orders from Obama.
In this lie, Spicer not only repeated a statement that was proven false, but also made it even more incorrect by elaborating on further incorrect statements.
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In a press conference on January 21, Spicer claimed the public was lied to about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd was and said that pictures were framed to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” as he made this outlandish claim:
“That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in-person and around the globe.”
Spicer was caught lying about the inauguration size more than a few times. He also lied about floor coverings being used on the National Mall, insisting it was the first they had been used even though floor coverings had been used since 2013.
Spicer also said it was the “first time” fencing and magnetometers were around the Mall which “[prevented] hundreds of thousands of people being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had inaugurations past,” but a 2017 Congressional Research Service report says that fencing had been used in past inaugurations. A New York Times reporter later tweeted that law enforcement officials confirmed that “magnetometers were not used in the areas Spicer said they were on the Mall.”
Next, he blamed the press for providing “inaccurate numbers involving crowd size.” Sources such as Politifact have pointed out that it’s complicated to measure exact crowd sizes and that the National Mall stopped counting crowd sizes in 1995 after a disagreement over crowd size.
How far will people go to prove something that only serves to help the President’s ego?
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Stephanie Grisham has such a bad reputation of lying that one journalist, Mehdi Hasan, said that Grisham is “the perfect appointment to an administration of pathological liars,” in a June 26 article.
When she replaced Huckabee as White House press secretary, Hasan said she would be perfect for the Trump administration because she is a “demonstrable liar.”
Hasan is one of the leading sources who has written about her false claims, and here are some of those infamous moments:
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In June 2018, the first lady was seen wearing a jacket that said “I really don’t care. Do U?”
After Melania Trump received criticism about the jacket, Grisham said “it’s just a jacket. There was no hidden message.” But in an interview in October 2018, Melania said the jacket “was kind of a message, yes” that was “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. And I want to show them that I don’t care.”
Hasan stated that Grisham “was willing to so brazenly lie about such a trivial issue — and has never acknowledged it or apologized.”
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If there’s one thing worse than Trump lying, it’s someone lying to cover up his lies.
Hasan says that in July 2018, Trump “falsely claimed that he had arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum, and had predicted the outcome of the vote,” which wasn’t true because he actually arrived in the country “the day after the referendum, on June 24.”
A BBC editor even tweeted about how Trump’s statement was “bizarre” and tweeted that he was there when Trump arrived on June 24th:
Grisham tried to defend Trump’s lie and told a BBC reporter that Trump arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016, and even tweeted saying she was there.
However, Trump basically confirmed otherwise when he tweeted he arrived in Scotland on June 24:
Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016
AFP Fact Check confirmed that Trump did arrive on June 24 and that Trump might have mixed up an interview with his arrival in the UK on June 24th, when the voting results were in.
However, Grisham seemed to know she was lying—but didn’t care.
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Kayleigh McEnany is now the fourth and latest Press Secretary. Despite being in her new position in the White House for a short amount of time, she has already been caught in some lies:
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In late February before the US first fatality from COVID-19, McEnany confidently declared that the virus wouldn’t hit our shores and after travel restrictions were made. She said, “we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.”
The coronavirus has hit every state in the US and has totaled over 400,000 positive cases according to CDC.
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As the coronavirus outbreak worsened and the White House coronavirus task force said crowd sizes should be limited to prevent the spread of the virus, McEnany told Trump loyalist Stuart Varney that the Trump campaign would not cancel any events saying “Look, we have the commander in chief, we have the best health experts, we are taking it day by day, we are currently proceeding as normal.”
She even attacked Joe Biden for not holding rallies during the outbreak as she said ” he’s suspending his rallies. He’s been dying to get off the campaign trail.”
When Varney said that the White House has already been “accused of chaos” and that the Trump campaign could also be accused of this if they do not adhere to warnings of mass gatherings, she just said “we’re not going to cave to the media and Joe Biden, we’re certainly not going to follow his lead as he tries to hide from the people.”
Later, Trump did end up having to cancel numerous rallies because of fears due to the coronavirus.
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During an appearance on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, after Chris Cuomo talked about Trump’s history of lies, McEnany lashed back by saying that Trump “doesn’t lie” and that “the press lies.”
However, Trump at this point has made so many false statements that the Washington Post has compiled an entire list of his lies, which includes over 16,000 in just his first three years.
It seems like McEnany has already established herself as untrustworthy rather quickly.
