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"He is planting the seeds for delegitimizing the election if he loses," Vanita Gupta, a former head of the Department of Justices civil rights division under President Barack Obama and now president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said on Twitter on Sunday in reaction to Trump's "rigged election" claim. "Its from the playbook. Itll get more intense as he gets more freaked out."

Trumps rhetoric isnt new for him. Dating back even before his entry into electoral politics, the president has had a long preoccupation with voter fraud and rigged elections. As a primary candidate, he attributed his Iowa defeat to fraud committed by Sen. Ted Cruz. Even after his general election victory, Trump made unsubstantiated claims of serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California three states he failed to carry and told congressional leaders that millions of illegal votes were the reason he lost the popular vote.

In one of his first acts as president, Trump created an 11-member commission to study alleged voter fraud. Two years later, amid the GOPs 2018 wipeout, he was lodging complaints about electoral corruption in Arizona and missing or forged ballots in Florida.

"Itll get more intense as he gets more freaked out."

Vanita Gupta, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

The concern that Trump might attempt to ignore the outcome of the election has persisted as an undercurrent in the Democratic Party since 2016, when Trump, during the years last presidential debate, refused to say if he would accept the elections outcome if he lost. In the years since, Democrats saw innuendo in Trumps jokes about extending his presidency beyond the constitutional limit of eight years and expressed admiration for Chinese President Xi Jinpings limitless terms.

Its one of those things that I think has a very low probability, but a very high risk, said David Skaggs, a former Democratic congressman who has discussed the potential for disruption in the November election with other lawmakers and former lawmakers in recent days. So even though I dont think its likely to eventuate into some kind of intervention at the state level by the president theres still some chance of that, and therefore its wise to take it seriously.

Skaggs said there are people remaining in government who take their oaths of office seriously and who are not going to be bowled over by a power grab. However, he noted the presence of a militia movement out there in the country that would probably rise to arms if the president said they should, and that would be awful.

I think the more there is reporting that takes the presidents innuendo seriously about this the integrity, or the dis-integrity of the election the more people will be on alert, he said. And that is some prophylactic, better than hydroxychloroquine.

While the unique and uncertain atmospheric conditions this year an election season rattled by the coronavirus crisis, which has postponed primaries and raised questions about voting procedures on Election Day in November have served to put critics of the president on edge, its his recent threats to withhold funding from Michigan and Nevada that have raised alarms.

Especially significant is Michigan, which Trump won in 2016 but where he is polling behind Biden.

Hes already set the stage to say its rigged, said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who has worked on nine presidential campaigns. This is part of the Trump autocrat playbook. Theres no way this guys going to win the popular vote, and its at least 50-50 hes going to lose the Electoral College. So, hes got to come up with something else.

The Biden campaign is signaling an awareness of the questions it raises. The former vice president told donors at a virtual fundraiser late last month that he is beginning a transition process, saying the Bush administration worked very closely with Barack [Obama] and me, with our administration, in terms of handing over power in the transition, according to a pool report.

I hope it's as smooth as it was then, he said, adding, I doubt it, but I hope so.

Bob Bauer, Bidens personal lawyer, said in a prepared statement that Trump may well resort to any kind of trick, ploy or scheme he can in order to hold on to his presidency.

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump's reelection effort, called any discussion about the presidents unwillingness to leave office if defeated baseless, ridiculous conspiracy talk and they should go see [Democrats] Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams because they actually have openly questioned their own election results.

The Trump administration recently started the process of planning for a transition of power if Biden wins, creating a transition planning group to prepare for the possibility.

But Trump has rarely been encumbered by fidelity to tradition. And Trumps former lawyer Michael Cohen once predicted in congressional testimony that there will never be a peaceful transition of power if Trump loses.

Would I be surprised if he gets beat in November and makes noises about not going out the door? No, and then what kind of constitutional crisis would that create, and then what would you do? said Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders during his 2016 campaign.

He likened the prospect facing Democrats to that of the 2000 presidential election, in which the Supreme Court prohibited further recounts of the Florida vote, awarding the presidency to George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore.

If its narrow, thats when Trump can really create a constitutional crisis, Longabaugh said. Think about the 2000 election, and if that was the election, what would Trump do? And you know, what would Trump do if the Supreme Court went against him? Would he do what Al Gore did and put the interests of the country above his own interests whether or not the Supreme Court was correct in its behavior or not? Thats where you get into, I think, scary territory.

At a minimum, Democratic doubts about Trump's willingness to accept the November results have increased the imperative to win by indisputable margins a heavy lift in an election that is widely expected to be close.

"My job is to make sure he loses Wisconsin so badly that he doesnt have an argument for sticking around that passes the smell test, said Ben Wikler, chairman of the state Democratic Party in Wisconsin, a state that is critical to Trumps path to reelection.

Noting that Trump has "filed a lot of lawsuits" in the past, he said, The bigger the margin, the safer democracy becomes.

But outside of a court challenge, Trumps options to disregard the elections outcome are extremely limited.

Theres a lot of people that need to do something to hold and implement the results of an election, said David A. Super, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center who has analyzed scenarios in which Trump could attempt to hold on to power. None of them is named Donald J. Trump. Theres absolutely no authority for canceling or overriding an election in the Constitution or in the statutes. And it would require the president to get multiple people to fairly blatantly disregard their oaths to uphold the Constitution.

The concerns about Trumps intentions are reminiscent to some Democrats of the anxiety they felt in the 1970s, when the net was closing around Richard Nixon and some feared he may not go easily.

The difference, said Les Francis, a former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, is that Nixon made an institutional decision to resign, while one thing we know about Trump, for sure, is hes not an institutionalist by any stretch of the imagination.

I dont think theres any depth to which he will not go, Francis said. I dont think there are any rules that he thinks apply to him. As his behavior grows worse, I think people become more alarmed at the possibilities.

See original here:
Trump sees a rigged election ahead. Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making. - POLITICO

In 2016, my vantage point on the donnybrook between Donald and Hillary was an Irish bar in Queens, where I was a bartender a few nights a week. It was a cash-only joint that sometimes stayed open until 7 a.m. and sold discounted cigarettes driven up from Virginia, the sort of place where you could make $800 under the table but you also might get a bottle or a chair thrown at you. This was where I watched the presidential debates and noticed something interesting. Half the patrons were Irish immigrants who considered Mr. Trump a real eejit, but the other half, the Irish Americans, thought he was just grand.

Something didnt compute. Werent the Clintons universally beloved by all with Irish blood? (See Derry Girls on Netflix for a sample of the rock star treatment they got after Bill brought peace to Northern Ireland.) It was puzzling to watch the barflies buzz about Trumps anti-immigration rhetoric a drawbridge mentality from a crowd whose lineage had been met with Irish Need Not Apply signs. The craic in the Queens shebeen turned out to be a sudsy microcosm: The green vote has never been more red.

All those Irish were Democrats for literally hundreds of years, said James F. McKay III, the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the largest Irish Catholic organization in the country. But what is the old saying? When they got the wrinkles out of the belly, they became Republicans.

No doubt. My own grandfather, one of 12 children raised in a two-bedroom house in County Armagh, sailed to Philadelphia, and cheered when John F. Kennedy became president. Sixty-six years later, some of my grandfathers children and his brother voted for Donald Trump.

The Irish vote has become not, unfortunately, the lockup of the Democratic Party, said Brian ODwyer, vice president of the Irish American Democrats, a political action committee. But it is one of the few swing votes, along with the Catholic vote, left in the United States, and you can see various patterns back and forth where the Irish in particular have gone one way or another.

Everyone agrees that theres no longer a cohesive bloc that votes on issues of Irish statehood or identity. But politicians have recognized that appealing to this nebulous tribe is just one more way to win precious swing votes.

We have millions of Irish, and I think I know most of them, because theyre my friends, President Trump said at a 2019 news conference with the Irish prime minister, or taoiseach, Leo Varadkar. More than 33 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and the swing districts that propelled Mr. Trump are mulched with them. His campaign has instructed supporters to text SHAMROCK to a phone number to join a new coalition, Irish Americans for Trump, and is hawking Trump Luck of the Irish whiskey glasses, two for $30.

During the Iowa caucuses, Joe Biden, the great-grandson of a blind fiddler from Irelands Cooley Mountains, dispatched Kevin OMalley, a former ambassador to Ireland, to towns with Catholic populations. Biden brought out the big guns by circulating a two-page endorsement letter handwritten by a nun. On St. Patricks Day, his campaign held a conference call with Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and a close Clinton ally, and leaders of Irish American organizations.

Last month, Mr. Biden did a virtual town hall with Hillary Clinton and nodded to both pols ties to the heavily Irish city of Scranton, Pa., by invoking James Joyce: You know that famous quote by Joyce, When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart? I think when we die, Scranton will be written on our hearts.

Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, calls blarney. He was in Scranton in early March to speak to a packed house at an anti-abortion prayer breakfast and told me: I think Biden is a weak candidate in this regard, as weak as Hillary. Hes just a globalist hes supported every one of these trade deals, he pushed NAFTA and hes soft on China. These issues, Mr. Bannon said, will be brought up to the working-class, blue-collar unions, which have still got a heavy participation by Irish Catholics.

The mythos of the once mighty Irish vote dates to the 1870s and to Tammany Hall. As the diarist George Templeton Strong wrote at the time: Our rulers are partly American scoundrels and partly Celtic scoundrels. The Celts are predominant, however, and we submit to the rod and the scepter of Maguires and OTooles and OShanes.

Since then, many presidents have claimed Irish ancestry, even Barack Obama. While in office he visited the town of Moneygall, home to one of his great-great-great grandfathers, and joked that Ive come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.

Of course the true zenith of Irishness was reached in 1960 with Kennedy. It was no easy feat to elect him, with many Americans suspicious that a Catholic commander in chief would put pope over country. Still, he listened to the advice given to him by Robert Frost: Be more Irish than Harvard.

By then, the Irish vote was decomposing. The tides of immigration from the Emerald Isle had waned. Irish Americans left the cities for the suburbs, and in 1980 many became Reagan Democrats, and, not long after, Republicans.

Its the repositioning of every ethnic group when they come to America, said Niall ODowd, the founder of Irish America magazine, the Irish Voice newspaper and IrishCentral.com. But theres a natural leaning of the Catholic Church being so far to the right on many issues in America that has taken many Irish Catholics with them, particularly on the issue of abortion.

Bill Clinton figured out how to juice the demographic years later. In 1992, during the New York primary, he pledged to a group of influential Irish power brokers that, should he become president, he would appoint a special envoy to Northern Ireland, then mired deep in the sectarian conflict known as the Troubles. It was a risky move that instantly rankled the British, but Mr. Clinton became a friend of the Fenians that day. He won his primary. When Hillary Clinton ran for a New York Senate seat in 2000, Bill hit the streets of Queens to play the Irish card on her behalf, as the Irish Times put it then.

This was one of the first bases Mrs. Clinton tapped as she geared up for her second presidential run. As early as 2012, Mrs. Clinton, then secretary of state, invited top Irish supporters to accompany her on a state trip to Dublin. And yet, some of them feel that candidate Clinton could have better used her Irish connection to meet swing voters where they were. Hillary missed a trick, said Mr. ODowd. I was sitting there when the head of Notre Dame offered her the huge invitation to speak. She wanted to do it, but following up with the campaign proved to be awfully impossible.

Caitriona Perry, an Irish journalist who crisscrossed the U.S. to write The Tribe: The Inside Story of Irish Power and Influence in US Politics, agreed that Mrs. Clinton paid insufficient attention to Irish-American communities. Ms. Perry said of the coterie around Trump, Weve seen so many Irish Americans pass through this administration that they are themselves reflective of Irish American families and communities who do align more broadly with the Republican Party and then specifically with Donald Trump.

The alt-Irish, as theyve been called, include Sean Spicer; Kellyanne Conway (ne Fitzpatrick); and the new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to name a few. But just as Eugene McCarthy had a Celtic foil in Joseph McCarthy, theres a Denis McDonough (a chief of staff to Barack Obama) for every Mick Mulvaney (Trumps former acting chief of staff), a Lawrence ODonnell for every Sean Hannity.

Whatever the case, President Trump does seem to know a thing or two about the Irish. You have to keep them as your friend, he said while being presented with the traditional shamrock bowl by the Irish prime minister at the White House last year. You dont want to fight with the Irish. Its too tough its too bloody.

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Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the Vote of the Irish - The New York Times

As protests rage after the death of George Floyd, his brother has described the actions of police as a "modern-day lynching" and called for the police officers involved to be charged with first-degree murder.

The death of Mr Floyd while a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck prompted a global outcry of anger over police brutality towards black people in the United States, which led to at-times violent protests across the country.

Derek Chauvin, the then-Minneapolis Police Department officer who was kneeling on Mr Floyd when he died, has been charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, but Mr Floyd's brother, Philonise, said all officers involved should "be convicted of first-degree murder and given the death penalty".

"They didn't care about what they wanted to do with my brother. He wasn't a person to them, he was scum, he was nothing," he told MSNBC.

"I can imagine how many people they did like that. I don't need them on the streets to kill anybody else.

"I'm hurt, my family's hurt, his kids are hurt they will grow up without a father. Everybody is crying and in pain right now."

Philonise Floyd spoke to MSNBC anchor and prominent African-American activist Al Sharpton about his brother's death and the response to it, saying President Donald Trump got in touch with him but that he struggled to get a word in.

"It was so fast. He didn't give me an opportunity to even speak," he said.

"I was trying to talk to him but he just kept pushing me off like 'I don't want to hear what you're talking about'.

"I just told him I want justice. I said I couldn't believe they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. I can't stand for that.

"It hurt me. I just don't understand, man.

"Why we got to go through this," he continued, clearly emotional.

"Why we got to have all this pain, man. I love my brother and I'm never going to see him again."

Protesting started in Minneapolis days after video of George Floyd's final moments spread across the internet.

Since then, there have been mass demonstrations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and more in the wake of not just Mr Floyd's death, but also the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia.

Some protests have spilled over into rioting and looting that has seen buildings burned down.

While Philonise Floyd said he did not condone the more violent actions, he completely understands their frustration, anger and pain.

"I see why a lot of people are doing a lot of different things around the world," he told CNN.

"I don't want them to lash out like that, but I can't stop people right now, because they have pain. They have the same pain that I feel.

"I want everything to be peaceful, but I can't make everybody be peaceful. I can't. It's hard."

Link:
George Floyd's brother says Donald Trump barely let him speak during their conversation - ABC News

American Comeback, the Trump campaign titled a new ad out this week. THIS NOVEMBER, the ad proclaimed, making clear the comeback he is referring to is not just the countrys struggle with the coronavirus pandemic but the restoration of his own political fortune, THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY IS WRITTEN.

That Trumpin the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depressionis writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious. It borders on the fanciful when considering the slew of numbersthe steadily mounting death toll, near-record unemployment and a majority of Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the crisisthat sketch a future trending in the opposite direction. But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.

At key points in Trumps long and public lifefrom his nadir in the 1990s to The Apprentice more than a decade later to his embattled campaign a decade after that and finally to his tumultuous presidencyTrump has used the idea of the comeback as a critical weapon in his arsenal of self-invention. A believer in a binary worldview that was a core teaching of his flinty fatherthere are winners and losers, and he always must be the former, not the latterTrump has used comeback as a fortifying piece of rhetoric that masks periods of failure, delaying a reckoning until theres something to brag about. Others might wait for actual evidence that a comeback has occurred, but Trump repeatedly has advertised his comebacks months and even years in advance. He has used it to bend in his favor unflattering media narrativesto tweak perception, to alter realityto conjure power, positivity and a sense of propulsion, especially at junctures when hes running low on all three.

The world that he lives in and projects, there are just two roles in it, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Youre a winner or a loser. And if theres a moment that youre not quite a winner, youre almost a winner. Youre practically a winner. Its a cloak that contains winning as a part of it.

Its his way of saying, I had a setback, and now Im coming backbut he never says he had a setback, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me.

He also uses it as a starting off point to build momentum, added Marcus, who worked for Trump from 1994 to 2000. It was a word that he pushed off on.

Comeback, said Sam Solovey, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice, who prepped for the show by reading every Trump book and biography, is the placeholder until victory is at hand.

It helped him get to the White House. And now, forced by circumstance to abandon his victory lap messaging of Keep America Great, Trump is reaching for it again as he tries his hardest to stay there.

Its just as critical to 2020 as it was in 2016, if not more so, former Trump aide Jason Miller told me. If hes the outsider, if hes the insurgent, he wins reelection. If hes viewed as the insider, the one whos the power holder in a tumultuous time, then winning becomes much tougher.

My name is Donald Trump, he said in the intro of the first show of the first season of The Apprentice, launching into a quick series of words and pictures associated with success. For Trump, the reality television show on NBC, which debuted in 2004, was a chance to cement his comeback taleand to do it in the way that he wanted, sandwiching what he took to calling his glitch or his blip basically between brackets of unfettered triumph. But it wasnt always easy, he explained. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back. And I won.

In the first half of the 90s, Trump constantly skirted financial ruin, facing for years the possible permanent tarnishing of the image he had cultivated in the 70s and 80s as an infallible deal-doer. Donald was broke, Stephen Bollenbach, the CFO Trumps lenders made him hire, would say. He was worse than broke. He was losing money every day. Even so, Trump talked about his comeback, not when his struggles began to wane but practically from their start.

All Donald knew was that he was still a story, Wayne Barrett wrote in his seminal biography. In the spring of 91, according to Barretts reporting, Trump announced to a consultant that he was determined to return to the cover of Time. He said he would be the comeback of the century.

In 1992, he redoubled his efforts, earning honeyed headlines on the cover of New York magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post. He refused to reflect on the past, skated through the present and relentlessly spun toward the future. Im not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself, he told the Sunday Times of London. I could be even bigger than ever.

Gossip columnists marveled at Trumps ability to shape the nature of the story. I mean, Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News told the Boston Globe in 1994, its not like hes the president.

Business bigwigs, meanwhile, marveled at it because it wasnt true. I think his recovery is an illusion, a real estate executive who did frequent business with Trump said to the reporter from the Globe. Its like the emperor has no clothes. I guess if you keep repeating it long enough people begin to believe it.

And he did. And they did.

And it worked.

In 1995, not quite five months after Trump successfully started selling stock in his failing casinos in New Jersey and his resurgence was looking legitimately less and less like a mirage, some of New Yorks business and government leaders honored Trump at a luncheon in Manhattan for what they dubbed the comeback of the decade. The lieutenant governor called him the comeback kid. Bill Fugazy, a limo company tycoon and onetime Roy Cohn crony, gave Trump a glass-encased boomerang. You throw it, he said, and it always comes back.

In 1996, in articles about Trump, the Daily News and the New York Times used comeback in headlines. By this time, thanks to the casino deal plus at-long-last development on a plot of land he was involved with on the Upper West Side, those headlines were no longer wrong. I think it says, Trump said, what Ive been doing over the years has been right. (Sound familiar?)

And in 1997, out came The Art of the Comeback, the sequel of sorts to The Art of the Deal. It never occurred to me to give up, to admit defeat, Trump (really Kate Bohner) wrote. He simply skips over the losing part. It is the unspoken chapter in the ongoing narrative, said Solovey, the first-season Apprentice contestant. He left out the Art of Losing.

Hence the intro to the show in 04. That same year, too, on multiple occasions, he made the claim that the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as having made the greatest personal financial comeback of all time. Its true. It did, in 1999 and 2000, a Guinness World Records spokesperson told me, before the Records Management Team decided the concept of a comeback was not standardizable across the globe. To use it the way he wanted to use it, he didnt need it to be.

He kept comeback as a cudgel, of course, when he turned toward politics.

In 2015, a little more than a month before he came down the escalator and officially entered the fray as a presidential contender, he gave a speech to the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. Our country is not going to have a comeback, he said, with any politician.

The rest of 2015 and into 2016, for most of the campaign, he didnt use the word that muchuntil he needed it, in October, when polls pointed to him losing to Hillary Clinton and perhaps by a lot. I know how to make a comeback, he said in a speech October 3 in Loveland, Colorado, referring to his experience in the 90s. I dont even think of it as a comeback, he said that same day in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. It was just, like, you know, we had tough periods, good periods, tough periods. We just knew that things were going to be just fine.

Americas comeback begins on November 8, he said in a speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on October 15, a week after the uncovering of his lewd comments on the Access Hollywood tape, when many figured his candidacy surely was doomed.

Hes never stopped using the word as president. But it started to tick up at the turn of the year. He was always going to run in 2020 by talking about a comeback.

But he wanted to run on one he was saying had just occurredand that he had engineered. Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback, he said in his State of the Union address the first week of February. Were in the midst of the great American comeback, he said repeatedly that month and into early March.

At that point, though, the dire reality of the coronavirus and its consequences began to become clear. It was no longer a credible pitch. The Trump campaign this year was going to be about KAGKeep America Greatbut now its another round of MAGA. Make America Great Again. Again. Trump not only has not shied away from using the word comeback but has doubled down, simply shifting from trumpeting one to forecasting anotherto trying, as is his wont as a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, to speak it into existence, never, ever losing, always either winning or on the way.

Theres going to be a comeback very, very quickly, as soon as this is solved, he said in a coronavirus briefing on March 18. And it will be solved. We will win. And there will be a comeback.

Were going to have a very quick comeback, he said on Fox News on March 24.

Well be the comeback kids, he said in the briefing on April 15. All of us. All of us.

He has very few moves, Marcus, the former Trump publicist, told me, and one of those moves is the comeback move.

See the article here:
Donald Trumps Lifelong Obsession with Comebacks - POLITICO

It was a mic drop designed to thrill conservatives and infuriate liberals and the media.

Kayleigh McEnany, the latest White House press secretary aiming to become the acceptable face of Trumpism, had been asked if she wanted to take back a bold prediction in February that we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.

I guess I would turn the question back on the media, and ask similar questions, McEnany said on Wednesday. Consulting her briefing book, she reeled off a list of outlets and articles she said had downplayed the threat.

Ill leave you with those questions, she said, and maybe youll have some answers in a few days.

And with a triumphant smile she stepped away from the lectern, ignoring shouted questions. Reporters wore surprised and stony faces, then relaxed into wry smiles. It was a classic piece of whataboutism as practised by pundits on cable news.

The TV president now has a TV emissary, a spokesperson who sometimes takes her eyes off the reporters in the room and looks directly into the camera. McEnany is from what the president likes to call central casting: a polished performer, devout Christian and devout Trumpian. And she is only 32.

Kayleigh McEnany: beautiful, Christian, conservative designed by nature to enrage MSNBC viewers, tweeted Ann Coulter, a rightwing author and commentator, referring to the liberal-leaning network whose hosts often eviscerate the president.

Read or listen to her words prior to her decision to jump on the Trump train. She is a completely different person

But to critics, McEnany is a Trump apologist trying to explain the inexplicable and excuse the inexcusable. They characterise her as an opportunist motivated by fame and power rather than any ideological faith. They say she has abandoned her religious principles to normalise a president widely condemned as a misogynist and racist.

The eldest child of a roofing contractor, McEnany is from Plant City, Florida, which she describes as the worlds strawberry capital. She attended the Academy of the Holy Names Catholic high school in Tampa and found time to volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004. She moved to Washington to study at Georgetown, took an exchange year at Oxford to study politics and served an internship in the Bush White House.

After graduating in 2010, she worked for three years as a production assistant at Fox News for Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and father of Sarah Sanders, Trumps second press secretary. In 2012, she wrote a tweet about Barack Obama, the countrys first black president, that has come back to haunt her: How I Met Your Brother Never mind, forgot hes still in that hut in Kenya. #ObamaTVShows.

McEnany wanted a job in front of the camera but couldnt get a break. Eventually she decided to become a student again, first at the University of Miami School of Law, then transferring to Harvard. Huckabee told the New York Times last month: I think one of the reasons that Kayleigh went on to law school was because she didnt see she was going to have an on-air opportunity at Fox any time soon.

But in 2015, McEnany received some intriguing career advice over cocktails from Michael Marcantonio, a fellow summer associate at a law firm and a Democrat. In an interview with the New York Times, he recalled telling her Donald Trump is going to be your nominee, adding that if a smart, young, blond Harvard graduate wanted to get on television and have a career as a political pundit, you would be wise to be an early backer.

McEnany did so. Networks were struggling to find eloquent champions of the Trump cause but she fitted the bill. She became a paid contributor on CNN, feeding the outrage machine and the concept of cable news as combat sport.

A political commentator acquainted with McEnany, who did not wish to be named, said: They brought her on board when it became pretty clear that there were few people who were willing to defend Donald Trump that were somewhat sane. Most people who were credible and experienced were not willing to put their names or reputations on the line to defend Donald Trumps crazy during 2016.

In June 2015, McEnany had described Trumps comments about Mexican migrants as racist and dismissed him as a showman. She quickly changed her tune. The source said: She is unrecognisable. If you were to read or listen to her words prior to her decision to sell her soul and jump on the Trump train, she is a completely different person.

To Trump supporters, McEnanys ability to rile liberals made her something of a heroine. Even at the nadir of the Trump candidacy, when an Access Hollywood tape revealed him boasting about grabbing womens genitalia, she had his back, saying: Those comments are despicable [but] he apologised for them.

Sean Hannity, a Fox News host, wrote in a forward to McEnanys book, The New American Revolution: The Making of a Populist Movement: Outnumbered 8-to-1, or if she was lucky, 7-to-2, Kayleigh never backed down in fighting for the conservative movement supporting Donald Trump.

Jason Miller, who also appeared as a pro-Trump pundit on CNN and is now co-host of the podcast War Room: Pandemic, said: Keep in mind that she went through a couple of years of being a CNN political commentator where she was rumbling with Erin Burnett and Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo and Van Jones and Ana Navarro and every other hater thats out there.

So if Kayleigh can go toe to toe with the toughest anchors and commentators on TV, shell do just fine with the White House press corps.

Once Trump had stunned the world by winning the White House in 2016, McEnany joined the Republican National Committee as spokeswoman, then moved to the Trump campaign in a similar role. She would sometimes work 18 or 20 hours a day, according to Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for the Trump campaign.

Kayleigh was fantastic, he said. Shes smart, shes energetic, shes engaged and shes the most prepared person that I know. She has a keen grasp of policy and is able to turn what are sometimes complicated policy matters into language that is easily digested by the listener.

Murtaugh accused opponents of discriminating against McEnany because of her looks and gender.

The first thing the liberals want to do when they see an attractive young woman in a position like this is they want to question her intelligence. And I would just say to people, you underestimate Kayleigh McEnany at your own peril. I dont think that theyre turning out too many dummies from Oxford and Harvard Law School.

Murtaugh also recalled how McEnany organised a Bible study group with other staff that met weekly in a conference room at campaign HQ in Arlington, Virginia. Since the pandemic lockdown, the group has continued to meet virtually.

Like many evangelicals, McEnany apparently sees no contradiction between Trumps behaviour and Christian values. Two years ago, when she had a preventative double mastectomy because of a BRCA2 genetic mutation that had put her at high risk of breast cancer, she wrote: My faith in Jesus Christ was my strength that day.

I will never lie to you. You have my word on that

She is an ardent admirer of Ravi Zacharias, a preacher whose organisation included a study centre in Oxford. She wrote in 2013: Oxford needed a Christian to respond to Richard Dawkins. Found that in Ravi, who has dismantled atheism. This week her sister, Ryann, who also works for the Trump campaign, tweeted: Watching my sister take the stage for her first White House press briefing last Friday was a surreal moment! Gods spirit was ever-present in that room and undeniably flowing through you.

In 2017 McEnany married Sean Gilmartin, a pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays. She posed with Blake, the couples five-month-old daughter, at the White House lectern after her debut briefing, the first by a press secretary in more than 13 months, where she declared: I will never lie to you. You have my word on that.

She now has three briefings under her belt. She has echoed Trumps false and misleading statements but avoided major controversy and, importantly, avoided stealing too much of his limelight.

Kurt Bardella, a political analyst and Trump critic who bested McEnany in a debate on gun control on MSNBC, said: Kayleigh is very on point, succinct, direct and speaks with a lot of confidence and comfort from the podium.

Like Conway, Bardella believes, McEnany saw a chance for career advancement and seized it.

Outside of the president, the White House press secretary traditionally is the most visible person in the administration. This is something that she will be able to live off of for the rest of her life.

I dont think that its diehard ideological alignment more than just an opportunity. Donald Trump is a person with no ideology or core conviction. This is someone whose core ideology is nothing more than whatever is transactional and advantageous to him at that moment in time.

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Kayleigh McEnany the 'acceptable' face of Trumpism who infuriates liberals - The Guardian