New White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany spent time during her Sunday to attack the Washington Post for not putting her quote up high enough in an article.
In a Tweet Sunday, McEnany revealed that she took time out of her busy schedule to count the 21 paragraphs that come before her quote in a piece.
She cited the right-wing organization News Busters, claiming that Post headlines about the White House's response to the coronavirus crisis have been "false."
The headlines have read things like "White House's chaotic response evokes Trump's early days." When the headline is googled, it isn't found online anywhere. They also cite the headline: "How the Trump administration squandered its response time," which appeared to be slightly different from the original headline as well. The story details the lost time during February when Trump was attending rallies and saying the coronavirus was nothing more than the flu.
The headline "President's ethos in sharp relief amid crisis" also doesn't appear anywhere online, and McEnany doesn't actually explain how this is false, generally, one's character is on display in public office. Another headline, "Stimulus watchdog removed as Trump subverts oversight," actually appears to be "Trump removes inspector general who was to oversee $2 trillion stimulus spending."
None of the headlines within the News Busters blog post appear to have links or screen captures attached to them, so it's unclear how they're gathering the information or the headlines. It is entirely possible that the headlines came from just the hard copies of the paper, but some of the headlines don't appear to have been used online.
Trump's approval of the coronavirus crisis stands at just 45.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, with 50.1 percent disapproving.
Trump retweeted her, calling the Post "slime balls."
"Our analysts tallied 53 obviously negative headlines during this 100 day period, compared with just two that were clearly positive, a greater than 25-to-1 disparity," wrote News Busters. The deaths of thousands of Americans is generally not seen as a positive.
So far, John's Hopkins reports there are nearly 55,000 deaths in the United States from COVID-19 in just the past few months. The Trump administration frequently compared the COVID crisis to former President Barack Obama's H1N1 crisis, which killed 12,469 people from April 2009 to April 2010. The U.S. is closing in on one million COVID cases, but only 1 percent of the population has been able to be tested.
It is unknown why the Trump White House is focusing on attacking the media instead of focusing on the need for testing and the deaths of so many Americans.
