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McEnany calls on Dem leaders to take action against rising violence

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A White House podium becomes ground zero for a fight over who’s failing to stop the bloodshed in America’s biggest cities.

Kayleigh McEnany walked into the White House briefing room on July 6, 2020, with a stack of numbers from the Fourth of July weekend that she wasn’t going to let pass quietly. The press secretary used the podium to demand that Democratic mayors and governors start treating a wave of urban shootings like the emergency it is, rather than a talking point to spar over. Her targets were specific, her tone was sharp, and her examples were the kind that stop a room.

• McEnany cited Chicago’s holiday weekend, where dozens were shot and multiple victims killed, including 7-year-old Natalia Wallace.
• She pointed to Atlanta, where 8-year-old Secoriea Turner was fatally shot near the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks had been killed weeks earlier.
• McEnany said President Trump had repeatedly offered federal resources, law enforcement assistance, and FBI support to cities like Chicago, New York, and Atlanta, offers she said local leadership had largely rebuffed.

The Weekend Body Count

McEnany didn’t mince the numbers. She walked through a holiday weekend that saw dozens shot in Chicago alone, a toll that included children caught in crossfire far from any specific target. That shooting spree, detailed elsewhere in reporting on 16 dead and 47 wounded across the city, became her Exhibit A for what she framed as a breakdown of basic order in Democrat-run cities.

Atlanta supplied the second gut-punch. Secoriea Turner was killed near the same Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks had died in a police shooting weeks before, a location that had become a flashpoint of protest activity. Her death, which is also covered in coverage of an 8-year-old girl shot in Atlanta, gave McEnany a second concrete example to put alongside Chicago’s.

Naming Names

McEnany didn’t stop at statistics — she named the officials she believes are falling short. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were each singled out for failing, in her telling, to maintain law and order or rein in street violence in their jurisdictions.

De Blasio in particular had already drawn criticism for moving to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget even as shootings climbed, a decision detailed in coverage of the NYPD budget cuts amid the crime surge. McEnany used that backdrop to argue that defunding police departments while violence spikes sends exactly the wrong signal to communities living through it.

McEnany framed the surge in urban shootings as an urgent public safety crisis rather than a partisan talking point, urging Democratic mayors and governors to protect vulnerable communities and hold criminals accountable.

The Federal Offer Still on the Table

Central to McEnany’s briefing was a claim she’s made repeatedly from that podium: that President Trump had offered federal resources, law enforcement assistance, and FBI support to help cities like Chicago, New York, and Atlanta combat the violence, and that local leadership had largely declined to take him up on it. She cast the standoff as a matter of political pride getting in the way of saving lives, not a genuine disagreement over tactics.

It’s a line McEnany has returned to often in briefings covered in pieces like her regular sparring sessions with the press corps — turning a reporter’s question into a chance to press her larger argument that Washington has resources sitting idle while mayors hesitate.

McEnany closed her remarks the way she opened them — pointing back at Natalia Wallace and Secoriea Turner, two children whose names she wanted in the transcript, not just the murder statistics. Whether Lightfoot, Bottoms, or de Blasio take up the federal offer she described remains the open question hanging over every briefing since.