White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Slammed Trump for ‘Racist,’ ‘Hateful’ Remarks in 2015

Win McNamee, Getty Images.

Current Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeatedly blasted then-candidate Donald Trump in early 2015 for his derogatory comments about immigrants, calling his rhetoric “racist,’ “hateful,” and “not the American way.”

According to a K-File report on CNN, McEnany, who was at the time a conservative writer and law student, made her highly critical comments about her future boss during several cable news panels on both CNN and the Fox Business Network. McEnany was just recently appointed as White House press secretary.

McEnany called out Trump for his campaign announcement claim that Mexican immigrants were “bringing crime” and “They’re rapists” in June 2015 on CNN. “To me, a racist statement is a racist statement. I don’t like what Donald Trump said,” McEnany said of Trump before saying his xenophobic comments were as “derogatory” and “equally hateful” as remarks made about Jewish people made by liberal provocateur Rev. Al Sharpton in the 1990s.

Days later, McEnany went after Trump on CNN again. “‘I think the mainstream Republican does not want to send the illegal immigrant back to Mexico. I think that they’re here to stay, that’s not the American way,” she explained. “We’re not going to ship people across the border. There has to be some path to citizenship. So, in that sense, I don’t think Donald Trump is consistent with mainstream Republicans. There’s going to be a path.”

Then, the next day McEnany tried to distance Trump from the Republican Party. “I don’t want to claim this guy,” she added. “So, the fact that the Republican Party is now having to claim him, is both unfortunate, and to me, inauthentic. Because this is not a true Republican candidate. And the fact that he’s being portrayed as such in media is troublesome and not accurate.”

But a little more than a week later, the K-File story noted, McEnany’s tone shifted and she began to defend Trump’s hardline immigration stance, even though he has never apologized for his nativist attacks. By early July, in fact, she had done a naer-complete flip-flop and tried to excuse his Trump’s smears by arguing he wasn’t condemning all Mexicans as rapists just that he was correct in saying it “is sending” rapists into the US.

Despite being reached multiple times for comment, McEnany did not respond to CNN.