“Fox News Sunday’s” host Chris Wallace continued on his path to becoming just another Left-wing hack over Memorial Day weekend, blasting White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany while giving voice to Trump haters so they could pile on his remarks.
As the BPR reported, Wallace began a segment of his show by playing a clip of McEnany’s Friday press briefing at the White House in which she was asked about President Trump’s promise to “override” governors who refused to allow churches in their state to reopen under the phony guise of ‘protecting’ people from coronavirus.
Specifically, McEnany was asked what authority in federal law the president had in making the threat.
“The president will strongly encourage all governors to allow their churches to reopen and boy, it’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to seem to see these houses of worship stay closed,” McEnany responded.
The clip then included one reporter saying he ‘objected’ to her comment, adding, “I’m dying to go back to church.”
Enter Chris Wallace, who first sought to elicit a response from network contributor Donna Brazile, the former DNC chief and adviser to Bill Clinton who was forced out at CNN for giving debate questions to Hillary Clinton ahead of an event with then-GOP nominee Donald Trump.
“Donna, I spent six years in the White House Briefing Room covering Ronald Reagan. I have to say, I never, and, in the years since too, I never saw a White House press secretary act like that,” he said in an obvious tee-up for Brazile.
Noting first that she knows McEnany well and respects her as a person, Brazile nonetheless criticized the White House spokeswoman’s “posture that she has taken into the job, I don’t think is the right posture.”
“I would hope that she could tone it down a bit,” Brazile continued. “I just thought that was inappropriate the way she went back assuming that many of the people sitting in that room did not care about houses of worship. We want to all return back to normal, whatever that means anymore…”
Wallace then took umbrage with McEnany for “lecturing” seasoned political reporters and providing them with a list of questions they should be asking regarding the disgraceful manner in which Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was treated by the Obama administration — because most media outlets are essentially ignoring the scandal.
“I have to say, if Kayleigh McEnany had told Sam Donaldson and me what questions we should ask, that would not have gone well, Jonah,” Wallace the tough guy said as he kicked it over to Never Trumper Jonah Goldberg.
“It’s nice to see Donna so deferential to Kayleigh McEnany,” he said, adding, “I think is indefensible and grotesque.”
“There’s this cliche in Washington that President Trump wants a Roy Cohn as attorney general,” a reference to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel who assisted in the hunt for Communists within the U.S. government in the mid-1950s. “What Donald Trump wants in a press secretary is a Twitter troll who goes on attack, doesn’t actually care about doing the job they have, and instead wants to impress, really, an audience of one.”
“It’s a sign of defining deviancy down in our politics and it’s only gonna make things worse,” Goldberg continued, without a hint of irony considering he was sharing the panel with someone who cheated on behalf of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.
Wallace then complained that while McEnany’s job is working on behalf of the administration, she’s “paid by taxpayers” and thus “are public officials” — another incredibly inappropriate observation given that the current press secretary is not the first ‘adversarial’ White House spokesperson to hold the position.
She “doesn’t act like a public servant, she acts like she is what she used to be, which is a spokesperson for the Trump campaign,” Wallace continued before moving to the third and final member of the panel, Josh Holmes, former chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
“Yeah, look, Chris, I just disagree, I think Kayleigh’s doing a nice job” he began. “What’s missing from this whole conversation we’ve had this morning is the context by which she is making these statements.”
He noted that any spokesperson for the Trump administration or campaign “finds themself under constant attack by the press,” adding that “the confrontational nature by which journalists approach the questioning is not really to obtain much information so much as to try and back them into a corner.”
“I think Kayleigh said, ‘I’m not gonna play that game,’ and so yeah, it is completely different from what we’ve seen in years and years of briefings from press secretaries,” Holmes added. “But I think it’s the [political] nature that we find ourselves in.”
Wallace responded both he and Donaldson — a longtime White House correspondent for ABC News — “were pretty tough on the White House press secretaries and we never had our religious beliefs questioned or were lectured on what we should ask.”
It should be noted that both Donaldson and Wallace were adversarial towards a conservative administration — the Reagan White House — which lends proper context to his statement.
