For a Trump administration official, Kayleigh McEnany is setting some sky-high goals.
In her first formal White House briefing Friday, the freshly minted press secretary pledged to "never lie" to reporters as part of her new job _ a promise that doesn't square well with her history of false statements about the coronavirus.
"I will never lie to you. You have my word on that," McEnany told reporters at the White House at the outset of the briefing, the first one of its kind in nearly 14 months.
McEnany, who replaced Stephanie Grisham as President Donald Trump's top spokeswoman on April 7, said that, contrary to her predecessor, she plans to hold at least somewhat regular press briefings.
"As to the timing of the briefings ... I will announce that forthcoming," she said. "But we do plan on doing these."
Despite McEnany's vow of honesty, even her very recent past is littered with inaccuracies and falsehoods.
"We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama," McEnany, then a spokeswoman for Trump's reelection campaign, said on Fox News in late February, when the COVID-19 outbreak had not yet hit the U.S. with full force.
As of Friday afternoon, the virus had killed nearly 65,000 Americans and infected more than 1 million, making the U.S. the world's worst-hit country in both categories.
Once on the job as press secretary, McEnany claimed in an April 16 tweet that Trump has "developed the most expansive and accurate testing system in the world."
Despite the tweet, the administration has not developed any nationally coordinated testing system and several other countries have tested more people per capita than the U.S.
Before she became a Trump world staple, McEnany was a prominent pusher of the false conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
"Birth certificates and college transcripts #ThingsThatEnrageDemocrats," she tweeted Aug. 12, 2012.
Besides promising to never lie on the job, McEnany spent Friday's White House briefing providing cover for Trump's claim that he has seen evidence China may have manufactured COVID-19 in a lab _ a claim contradicted by the president's own intelligence community.
"Let me remind everyone that intelligence is just an estimation," McEnany told reporters. "In this case, policymakers, the president of the United States _ he will make the decision at the right time."
