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Trump builds campaign-style press shop at the White House

The White House wants to expand its rapid response teams tasked with monitoring and attacking critics of the president’s efforts to quell the coronavirus outbreak.

By MERIDITH MCGRAW

Kayleigh McEnany was brought on as White House press secretary to add a counterpunch, campaign-style energy to President Donald Trump’s communications team.

McEnany is starting to show how she plans to do that. On Wednesday, she started blasting tweets from the official White House press secretary account, hitting Speaker Nancy Pelosi in at least five tweets. On Thursday, she made her first “Fox & Friends” appearance in her new role, reiterating her Pelosi attacks and chiding the media. And she’s working in parallel with the Trump campaign as both the White House and campaign expand their communications and rapid response teams tasked with monitoring and attacking any critics of the president’s efforts to quell the coronavirus outbreak.

Like her predecessors, though, McEnany has numerous hurdles.

Some are everlasting White House struggles — an off-script and impulsive president, and competing Trump-world factions. Already, many in the press shop were caught off guard Monday when Trump played a hastily edited montage at his daily White House briefing that seized the internet’s attention. Others are unique to McEnany’s situation. She was brought in at the same level as another press aide, raising eyebrows about rank. And she arrives weeks after the return of Hope Hicks, a former communications director now working for Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner.

So far, however, the result has been a further melding of the White House and Trump campaign. The campaign has long been a landing spot for scores of departing Trump officials. But McEnany’s move shows the door swings both ways — and the two sides appear to be synching up their messaging strategies.

“We were sorry to lose her, but if she’s going to go anywhere the White House is where she should go,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in an interview. “We are all part of the president’s team.”

On the Trump campaign, McEnany, 31, earned a reputation for her aggressive defenses of the president. She would make appearances on cable television and travel across the country attending campaigns. A Harvard Law School graduate, McEnany has also worked as a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and as a TV producer and pundit.

Officials felt the pugilistic style would be good for the White House. And Trump’s new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wanted to restructure and beef up the communications shop. In addition to McEnany, Meadows brought on two of his former aides, Alyssa Farah, a top Pentagon spokesperson, and Ben Williamson, his chief of staff. Farah took on the role of strategic communications director, while Williamson will be a senior communications adviser.

McEnany and Farah were both brought on as deputy assistants to the president, even though the press secretary is typically an assistant to the president.

“The big question is, what is her role and what do they want from her?” said one former senior administration official. “As silly as it sounds, it matters — that’s the pecking order in how high you are, it really is a matter of protocol. So the big question is going to be how they want to structure this role.”

The press shop changes come after complaints that the White House communications team wasn’t doing enough to defend the president during the coronavirus response, according to a senior administration official.

To address that concern, McEnany and her new team are working to add even more communications staffers, including additional staff for the rapid response team, which monitors news coverage and sends out talking points and emails to surrogates, according to a White House official.

Similarly, the Trump campaign is also looking to hire more communications staffers, even after the team started working from home in mid-March. There are no plans at the moment to directly replace McEnany, though.

“Kayleigh is really one of the finest professionals I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” Murtaugh said. “Her work ethic is unmatched, she has a great grasp of policy and she’s able to take her knowledge of policy and turn it into conversant language that people can understand.”

The dual-track work is indicative of how the Trump administration and Trump campaign have adopted similar messaging strategies as the president enters the heat of a 2020 campaign that might be fought over how the coronavirus pandemic is handled.

The former administration official warned that McEnany will have to be careful about managing her role as press secretary given her ties to the campaign. Public-facing White House officials like Kellyanne Conway have been accused of violating the Hatch Act, a 1930s-era law that prohibits members of the executive branch — except the president and vice president — from engaging in political activity during work hours, although there has been little or no punishment for violators.

At the White House, McEnany’s team will have to deal with both a rogue president and a White House not known for its internal communication.

For example, just hours before Trump’s daily briefing on Monday, the president and his director of social media, Dan Scavino, decided to cobble together a video that tried to rebut press reports that the president had dismissed early warnings about the coronavirus.

The video displayed a montage about the administration’s response, splicing favorable news clips between headings like “the media minimized the risk from the start … while President Trump took decisive action … even as partisans sniped and criticized.”

It was the most memorable part of the briefing. Yet some members of the communications team did not know the video was coming, according to White House aides.

There is also Kushner and Hicks, who some aides have described as operating a shadow communications team. While Hicks, who recently returned to the White House as a top Kushner aide after a few years in the private sector, is not doing any communications work, both she and Kushner are close to the president. A source familiar with the situation denied Hicks is playing any communications role.

Officials who have worked at the White House since the beginning say managing these unexpected moments and competing power centers is part of a day’s work. Surprises, mostly from the president, are expected. A revamped press shop can only do so much.

“It’s like blaming the fire department because an arsonist keeps lighting fires,” a former White House official said. “You have a president who wants to say what he wants when he wants. They keep trying to tweak the press staff as if that’s the problem, but there’s no formulation that’s ever going to fix what they want. If we change the deck chairs, things aren’t going to change.”

Prior to the Trump administration, the press secretary typically briefed the press, coordinated important interviews, answered press inquiries and occasionally appeared on television. But under Trump, the role has been turned on its head. Daily briefings slowly petered out before dying altogether under McEnany’s predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, who didn’t give a single briefing from the White House podium during her nine months as press secretary.

For now, Trump appears to be the only person planning to give daily press briefings. With in-person campaigning on hold, the president has been deprived of the cheering crowds, rock anthems and festival-like atmosphere of his rallies, not to mention the platform they gave him to air his grievances.

Instead, he’s used his briefings as a platform to deliver much of the same rhetorical flourishes. The briefings, during which the president updates the public on the government’s latest efforts to combat the coronavirus, often devolve into verbal fistfights with the press cheered online by supporters watching from home.

But officials pushed back on the notion that the briefings are filling the void of a rally.

“They are not the same thing. They do not serve the same purpose,” a Trump campaign official said. “He is taking questions from the press corps to make sure the facts are out there, and everyday, it’s our job to continue to amplify that message.”

Despite not having rallies, the Trump campaign has touted its digital operation. Since mid-March, when the campaign began teleworking, the campaign has signed up more than 276,000 volunteers. The campaign has also seen millions of unique viewers tune in to the campaign’s webcasts, which have featured top surrogates like Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.

“We’re not doing rallies right now of course, but just because the president isn’t doing rallies doesn't mean the data we’ve gathered has disappeared, we’re putting it to use,” Murtaugh said. “We have voter contact files and we have found there are millions of Trump supporters at home with time on their hands and maybe they’ve already watched Tiger King twice.”