Just hours after the final presidential debate, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Friday was still dragging out President Donald Trump’s attack on the debate commission suggesting that it was at fault for voters not getting to hear more from the President on key election issues — even though Trump laid the ground work for that weeks ago.
“Unfortunately, because the Commission on Presidential Debates, really decided to cancel the second debate, what that meant is that the American people were deprived of a lot of the information that they were entitled to,” McEnany told reporters.
The comments come the morning after President Trump took the debate stage in Nashville, Tennessee, for a final face-off with Democratic rival Joe Biden.
McEnany described the post-debate Trump as “quite happy, quite enthused,” to reporters outside the White House and said that Trump believed Americans had “endorsed his performance at the debate.”
“When you debate on the merits there’s a clear victor and that’s President Trump,” McEnany said, even though a number of snap polls have indicated that Biden had out-performed the President in the final showdown.
The press secretary’s comments on Trump’s debate performance appeared to preface the scathing attack that followed against the debate commission. Perhaps at a loss to offer further praise for Trump’s performance, she turned on debate organizers, accusing them for depriving Americans the chance to hear from both candidates when last week’s debate was cancelled.
McEnany took pains to rewrite the debacle on Friday by attributing a decision by Trump to bow out of the second debate to the CPD. She suggested that the American people were robbed of the opportunity to hear more from both candidates ahead of Election Day when the Oct. 15 debate in Miami, Florida, was cancelled after Trump said he would not participate in a virtual contest after announcing he had tested positive for coronavirus.
