Former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany laid into President Joe Biden during Thursday’s broadcast of “Outnumbered” on Fox News, lambasting his long-awaited press conference as “the most delusional” she had ever seen.
McEnany joined her co-hosts in responding to Biden’s lengthy Wednesday afternoon presser — the first in weeks — that came on the eve of his first anniversary in office.
Co-host Harris Faulkner began the segment with a clip of Biden saying that he didn’t “believe” polls that suggested Americans were not happy with his performance thus far. “That’s interesting, Marc, and this isn’t a fact-check, just an observation. While he says he doesn’t believe them, how come he knew all the numbers at one point?”
“They all say the same thing — This is not like an outlier here or there, he started out his presidency with 56% approval and a 20 points above water on approval versus disapproval,” Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen replied. “He is today at about 41% and ten points underwater so that goes from 20 points above water to 10 points underwater in just a year. It’s stunning. If this is outperforming expectation, I would hate to see what underperforming expectations look like. It reminds me of that – there was a USA Today poll where nearly half the country said that Biden has done a worse job than they expected, and I thought to myself, the rest of them think, ‘No, that’s pretty much what I expected. It’s as bad as I thought it would be.'”
“Our former President Trump used the phrase ‘promises kept.’ And this president last — yesterday was asked specifically about keeping promises,” Faulkner said then, turning the question over to McEnany.
“I thought that was most delusional press conference I have ever seen,” McEnany said. “He said he over-performed and that the American people give him a 33% approval rating in Quinnipiac.”
McEnany then ran down a list of issues on which Biden had claimed success, pointing to poll numbers that suggested the American people felt otherwise: “He begins by touting the economy where the American people give them an approval rating of anywhere between 36 and 40%. He said he did not make a mistake in Afghanistan, but the American people say, nope, 31% approval, President Biden.”
“It was also the first time we had seen the president of the United States, or really Biden ever, in a two hour solo format … First time we see him for two hours in the solo format, and I left that press conference genuinely scared for the future of our country,” McEnany continued. “This is someone who is deeply delusional, someone who clearly does not know how to lead. He does not have a basic grasp on the facts, he continued to peddle mistruth after mistruth, emboldening Putin, emboldening Xi in China, and this is only one year. We’ve only had one year of President Biden, and look at the crises and the fires across the country that he completely ignores.”
McEnany concluded by saying that the real problem was a press that seemed uninterested in holding Biden’s feet to the fire and demanding answers.
“I was very disturbed by the reporters — so I can tell you if President Trump had said half of what Biden had said yesterday, reporters would’ve been screaming,” she said. “They would have had follow-ups. They would have spoken over President Trump as he was speaking, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. President, that’s not true.’ They didn’t do that yesterday. It’s a toxic formula when you have a delusional president and a press corps that is just uninterested in basic follow-up.”