The McEnany Effect: How One Woman’s Binder Became Global Soft Power
Kayleigh McEnany: America’s Glitter-Flecked Mouthpiece and the Global Art of Weaponized Optimism
By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk
From the frostbitten tundra of Siberian newsrooms to the humidity-soaked cafés of Bogotá, political correspondents have long kept a collective bingo card of uniquely American phenomena: 24-hour pancake joints, school-shooting drills, and televised press secretaries who smile like they’ve just been handed the nuclear codes and a coupon for lip gloss. Kayleigh McEnany, the former White House press secretary turned Fox News co-host, now occupies a special square on that card—one labeled “American Deflector Shield, Now in HD.”
To outsiders, McEnany’s rise is less biography than parable: a Harvard Law graduate who swapped the courtroom lectern for television lights, proving that jurisprudence and showmanship are separated only by better contouring. In countries where the nightly news still looks like two exhausted civil servants reading crop forecasts, her performance art is mesmerizing. German reporters call it “Kaspar-Hauser-Effekt”—the sense that a perfectly coiffed child has been locked in a cable-news basement until she speaks fluent doublespeak. Japanese analysts, ever polite, call her “Purikyua no bansen”—the magical-girl version of a battleship.
Global diplomats, however, treat Mcenany less as a curiosity and more as an early-warning system. When she declares the administration “the most transparent in history” while brandishing a three-ring binder thick enough to stun an ox, foreign ministries take note. The binder—color-coded, tabbed, and gleaming under the klieg lights—has become an inadvertent export commodity. In the Philippines, aides joke about ordering a McEnany Binder™ to wave at pesky reporters; in Hungary, officials simply Photoshop their own faces onto her televised stills. It’s soft power by way of prop comedy.
The wider significance is sobering. McEnany’s tenure coincides with the global drift toward what French theorists call “la politique du sourire”—the politics of permanent, weaponized optimism. Brazil’s Bolsonaro, India’s Modi, even Turkey’s Erdoğan have all borrowed the aesthetic: big grin, bigger flag, biggest possible blind spot. When McEnany delivers a 90-second answer that contains zero factual calories yet leaves viewers oddly satisfied, she’s not just spinning; she’s teaching a master class. The lesson plan is downloaded in authoritarian WhatsApp groups from Caracas to Cairo, usually with captions like “Watch and learn.”
Ironically, the countries that once exported propaganda are now importing McEnany’s techniques. Russia’s state networks, nostalgic for the blunt hammers of Soviet agitprop, find themselves entranced by her velvet stiletto. Chinese censors, masters of the abrupt cutaway, study her seamless pivots from pandemic death tolls to stock-market tickers as if watching a kung-fu movie in reverse. Even North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, rumored to run the regime’s “Charm Offensive” unit, is said to keep a folder labeled “KM Smirk Variations.” Whether the Dear Sister ever deploys the full dental arsenal remains classified, but experts note a suspicious uptick in her uncharacteristic Mona Lisa moments.
What does this mean for the rest of us, sipping flat whites in London or yerba mate in Montevideo? Simply that the McEnany model is portable. All you need is a camera, a flag lapel pin, and the unshakeable belief that every question is merely an opening for your pre-written paragraph. In an age when trust is scarcer than microchips, the ability to beam unalloyed confidence across fiber-optic cables is geopolitical gold. The International Monetary Fund doesn’t track it yet, but give it time; somewhere an economist is drafting a white paper titled “Smile Gap: The Hidden Metric of National Solvency.”
Of course, cynics will point out that McEnany’s greatest export is not information but the illusion of information. Fair enough. Yet in a world where the nightly news is often indistinguishable from a hostage video, the illusion at least has production value. And if that sounds bleak, remember: empires have fallen on less marketable slogans. At least this one comes with eyelash extensions and a theme song.
In the end, Kayleigh McEnany is less a person than a weather system—an atmospheric high-pressure zone of certainty drifting across continents, leaving behind either drought or deluge, depending on which side of the screen you occupy. The forecast, alas, calls for continued sparkle with a 70 percent chance of selective amnesia. Pack an umbrella, or better yet, a binder.
