Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars proves there’s a double standard for conservatives when it comes to making jokes about women’s appearances, according Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump White House press secretary.
Ms McEnany, now a panelist on Fox News, said on Outnumbered on Monday morning that as she watched the slap, she couldn’t help but think back to the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner.
At the dinner, where entertainers roast the current administration and the press, comedian Michelle Wolf made cutting jokes about the press secretary at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which generated a storm of controversy among conservatives who felt the remarks were unfair comments about Ms Sanders’ appearance.
“I watched Sarah Sanders sit there, my predecessor, with such grace and poise and kindness and just sit there and take it,” she said. “Because if you’re a Republican woman, you have to take it. If you’re a celebrity and you engage in this behaviour, you’ll have people come to your defence.”
Ms McEnany referred to since-deleted tweets from New York Representative Jamaal Bowman, a Democrat, who said, “Teachable Moment: Don’t joke about a Black Woman’s hair." She also mentioned how a CNN analyst, Asha Rangappa, compared the incident and seeming lack of protest from the audience at the Oscars to how “Trump got normalised.”
At the time of the White House Correspondents Dinner, Ms Sanders did in fact have people rally to her defence – including the president, who called Ms Wolf a “filthy ‘comedian’” who “totally bombed [and] couldn’t even deliver her lines.”
Additionally, unlike the Oscars incident, where Mr Rock made a direct joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s baldness, Michelle Wolf also denied that she was mocking Ms Sanders’s appearance.
“I actually really like Sarah,” went the joke that inspired the most criticism. “I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”
The comedian noted in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air after the dinner that she had made jokes about people’s appearance without any apparent backlash.
“If there is two people that I actually made fun of their looks on Saturday it was Mitch McConnell and Chris Christie and no one is jumping to their defence. I made fun of Mitch McConnell’s neck and I did a small jab at Chris Christie’s weight and no one is jumping to their defence,” she explained.
Donald Trump frequently mocked people for their appearance during his public life, presidential campaign, and time in office.
He gave his opponents nicknames like Sleepy Joe Biden and Little Marco Rubio.
During the 2016 president campaign, he retweeted a statement calling then Fox News host Megyn Kelly a “bimbo” and said she had “blood coming out of her whereever,” after she pressed him about his record of demeaning remarks towards women during one of the debates.
