2 big problems with Kayleigh McEnany’s Bob Woodward response

But two of McEnany’s arguments, in particular, strained credulity.

One was when McEnany flatly denied Trump had been misleading about the danger of the coronavirus. “The president never downplayed the virus,” she claimed.

That contradicts the record, which includes Trump downplaying the threat more than 100 times since it reared its ugly head. But even if you accept that such evaluations are subjective, Trump himself explicitly admitted — on tape — that he was in fact constantly downplaying the threat, and deliberately so.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19. He added: “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

So McEnany says Trump “never” downplayed it; Trump says that he “wanted to always” do so.

The remark was held up as a testament to Trump’s coronavirus response — from someone with whom he has occasionally clashed and whom Trump critics have held up as an icon in the coronavirus fight.

But Fauci wasn’t saying what McEnany suggested.

First off, Fauci was talking more broadly about the federal response. The question he was responding to, from conservative radio host Mark Levin, wasn’t specifically about Trump, nor did Fauci cite Trump before saying what he did.

And second, even Fauci, in comments spanning the Levin interview, made very clear that the federal government had come up short in certain — and very important — respects.

On March 12, just a week and a half before this supposed testimonial for Trump’s coronavirus response, Fauci admitted that testing to that point had been a “failing.”

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now,” Fauci said, referring to faulty tests that dogged the early response. He added, “It is a failing, let’s admit it.”

Fauci also admitted in the weeks after the Levin interview that strict, earlier measures would have reduced deaths.

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing, and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci said, adding, “But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

This was the Fauci comment that preceded Trump retweeting a call for his firing. Fauci later tempered his comments, saying that his reference to “a lot of pushback” was “the wrong choice of words.”

When asked if he was amending his comments to please Trump, Fauci bristled. “Everything I do is voluntarily,” he said. “Please, don’t even imply that.”

But Fauci’s comments certainly indicated there were holes in the federal response, if not necessarily holes that he blamed on Trump. And McEnany’s suggestion that Fauci was saying the federal — or even Trump’s — response was beyond question is directly contradicted by Fauci’s comments about testing in mid-March.

In that light, it’s evident that Fauci was referring to what the government was doing precisely at that point — whatever might have come before it or afterward. To pitch it as some kind of unequivocal endorsement of Trump’s response is almost as misleading as McEnany saying that Trump “never downplayed the virus.”