Former White House press secretary turned Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany on Monday unleashed perhaps the most egregious take yet on Will Smith violently slapping Chris Rock at Sunday night’s Academy Awards over a joke about Smith’s wife.
According to the one-time Trump spokesperson, the Best Actor Oscar-winner’s assault on a beloved comedian was pretty much the same thing as comic Michelle Wolf making jokes about then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
During Monday’s broadcast of Fox News’ midday roundtable show Outnumbered, McEnany and other hosts took issue with a couple of Black progressive lawmakers briefly applauding Smith on social media for standing up for his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. (Rock cracked a joke about Pinkett Smith’s lack of hair, which she’s previously said is due to her alopecia.)
“The only policing I saw were the joke police,” anchor Harris Faulkner grumbled. “And I guess their leader is Will Smith.”
“I think a large point here as well is the hypocrisy coming out of the progressive political left,” co-host Emily Compagno reacted, adding: “Keep in mind, Rep. Ayanna Pressley tweeted out praise of Will Smith’s violent act—essentially celebrating a violent act—then deleted it.”
Faulkner would go on and state that a stranger or fan would have been stopped if they ran up on stage, noting that “because it’s Will Smith, I guess they don’t.” McEnany agreed, asserting that “it would be different treatment than it would be for a celebrity.” (Ironically, it was her old boss who once infamously boasted that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”)
“Although I think very different scenario when you think too, I could not get out of my head the White House Correspondents’ Dinner from 2018 where Sarah Sanders was so maliciously attacked,” McEnany declared before butchering Wolf’s name. “You had Samantha Wolf or Bee— whatever the heck her name is, Michelle Wolf—going after Sarah Sanders for her appearance.”
She continued: “Minutes long, excruciating detail, and I watched Sarah Sanders sit there with such grace and poise and kindness and sit there and take it. If you are a Republican woman, you have to take it. If you are a celebrity and you engage in this behavior and you’ll have people come to your defense!”
McEnany went on to say that while there was “no excuse for violence” on Smith’s part, she felt that Rock’s joke was “totally out-of-bounds.” At the same time, though, she also complained about those rallying behind the King Richard star.
“Jamaal Bowman, another congressman, came to the defense of Will Smith,” she groused. “You had a CNN commentator who actually blamed this on Donald Trump, coming to Will Smith’s defense.”
The hot takes over The Slap have been coming fast and furious since Sunday night. One right-wing pundit insisted that Smith’s actions were proof of Black “privilege,” asserting that if the actor “was a white guy, he would have been led out of the Oscars in handcuffs. Ultra-conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, meanwhile, said this was proof of the left’s belief that “microaggressions should be met with actual physical violence.”