Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany will officially join Fox News as an on-air commentator, the network announced Tuesday.
The news, which was announced by Fox News host Harris Faulkner, comes after weeks during which the network had equivocated about McEnany's role at the network.
"It is my distinct pleasure to welcome Kayleigh McEnany to the Fox family," Faulkner said. "We will be seeing much more of her."
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment beyond Faulkner's statements.
McEnany, a former CNN contributor, was a spokesperson for Trump's 2020 re-election campaign and took on the role of White House press secretary last spring. She told reporters as she took the job: "I will never lie to you."
That promise quickly became the subject of criticism, as McEnany routinely defended and promoted misleading statements made by then-President Donald Trump. McEnany proved to be one of Trump's most ardent defenders during the election, with Fox News at one point cutting away from a press conference she held in early November in which she pushed false claims of voting irregularities.
McEnany is the latest person to walk through the revolving door between Fox News and the Trump White House: Sarah Sanders, another former press secretary, joined Fox News before leaving to eye a run for Arkansas governor. Larry Kudlow, Trump's former economic director, recently joined Fox Business Network where he hosts his own show. Hope Hicks, Trump's longtime communications director, also joined Fox News' parent company, Fox Corp., in 2018 to serve as its executive vice president and chief communications officer. She later returned to the Trump White House.
While Fox News was a bastion of pro-Trump rhetoric during his presidency, the two sides had a falling out during the 2020 election after the cable news channel declared Joe Biden the winner in Arizona ahead of other media outlets and refused to wholly embrace his campaign to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Several on-air personalities did embrace that conspiracy, and are now named in a lawsuit against the company.
Despite breaking from the president then, the network has continued to try to shore up support among his base at a time when it faces competition from smaller and more extreme competitors, most notably Newsmax and One America News Network. Its primetime stars consistently hammer Democrats and progressives, stoke the nation's culture wars and offer a platform for falsehoods and conspiracy theories. In January, Fox News extended its opinion programming into the 7 p.m. ET hour.
