Trumpism Corrupts: Spicer Edition
9:05 PM, JAN 21, 2017 | By JONATHAN V. LAST
The first official White House press conference is on Monday, but Sean Spicer called a Very Special Presser Saturday evening. Why? He had something he wanted to get off his chest. "[P]hotographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall," he said. After trotting out some scientific-sounding numbers, he then insisted that "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period —both in person and around the globe." And that "These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong."
Here's what got Spicer so agitated that he had to come out and lie to reporters on a Saturday night—it's side-by-side pictures of the crowds from the Obama 2009 inaugural and Trump's. Go ahead and take a good, long look. I'll wait.
So it's not close. More people showed up to watch Obama. Also—news flash—more people voted for Obama.
But here's the thing: None of that matters. Obama was a terrible president who shepherded the American economy through a weak-kneed recovery, increased partisan divisions, diminished America's presence abroad, abandoned our allies, and emboldened our foes. He trapped his party inside a flaming wreckage so terrible that it enabled Donald Trump to get elected president.
Crowd size does not matter. At all. It is not correlative with any conceivable marker of presidential success.
Which leads us to the question of why Spicer rushed out on Day 2 of the administration to begin his relationship with the press by insisting on a blatant, demonstrably false, lie. And please understand: That's what this is. It is not spin, or misrepresentation, or cutting a fine line. It's a deliberate lie.
And the answer is that this isn't about Sean Spicer. He's already been caught lying in the recent past.
Allow me to refresh your memory: After the St. Louis presidential debate, my colleague John McCormack asked Spicer if he would characterize the actions Trump described taking on the Access Hollywood tape as sexual assault. Spicer replied, "I don't know. I'm not a lawyer." After McCormack's story ran, Spicer insisted that McCormack was making up the quote. "I never said it," he told the Washington Post. The Post then updated its story with the following: "McCormack provided The Post with an audio recording of a man who clearly sounds like Spicer, in the spin room, speaking those exact words." (Other reporters had the audio, too.)
McCormack is a nice guy, so he let it slide. I'm not. Rule #1 for press relations is that you can obfuscate, you can misrepresent, you can shade the truth to a ridiculous degree, or play dumb and pretend not to know things you absolutely do know. But you can't peddle affirmative, provable falsehoods. And it's not because there's some code of honor among press secretaries, but because once you're a proven liar in public, you can't adequately serve your principal. Every principal needs a spokesman who has the ability, in a crunch, to tell the press something important and know that they'll be believed 100 percent, without reservation.
But here's the thing: None of that matters. Obama was a terrible president who shepherded the American economy through a weak-kneed recovery, increased partisan divisions, diminished America's presence abroad, abandoned our allies, and emboldened our foes. He trapped his party inside a flaming wreckage so terrible that it enabled Donald Trump to get elected president.
Crowd size does not matter. At all. It is not correlative with any conceivable marker of presidential success.
Which leads us to the question of why Spicer rushed out on Day 2 of the administration to begin his relationship with the press by insisting on a blatant, demonstrably false, lie. And please understand: That's what this is. It is not spin, or misrepresentation, or cutting a fine line. It's a deliberate lie.
And the answer is that this isn't about Sean Spicer. He's already been caught lying in the recent past.
Allow me to refresh your memory: After the St. Louis presidential debate, my colleague John McCormack asked Spicer if he would characterize the actions Trump described taking on the Access Hollywood tape as sexual assault. Spicer replied, "I don't know. I'm not a lawyer." After McCormack's story ran, Spicer insisted that McCormack was making up the quote. "I never said it," he told the Washington Post. The Post then updated its story with the following: "McCormack provided The Post with an audio recording of a man who clearly sounds like Spicer, in the spin room, speaking those exact words." (Other reporters had the audio, too.)
McCormack is a nice guy, so he let it slide. I'm not. Rule #1 for press relations is that you can obfuscate, you can misrepresent, you can shade the truth to a ridiculous degree, or play dumb and pretend not to know things you absolutely do know. But you can't peddle affirmative, provable falsehoods. And it's not because there's some code of honor among press secretaries, but because once you're a proven liar in public, you can't adequately serve your principal. Every principal needs a spokesman who has the ability, in a crunch, to tell the press something important and know that they'll be believed 100 percent, without reservation.
But like I said, this isn't about Spicer.
What's worrisome is that Spicer wouldn't have blown his credibility with the national press on Day 2 of the administration unless it was vitally important to Trump.
And if media reports about crowd size are so important to Trump that he'd push Spicer out there to lie for him, then it means that all the tinpot-dictator, authoritarian, characterological tics that people worried about during the campaign are still very much active.
You know who obsessed about crowd size? Fidel Castro. You know who did not? George Washington, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and every other man to ever serve as president of these United States of America.
If you want to support the Trump agenda, that's fine. Worth doing, even. But never lose sight of the degree to which Trumpism corrupts.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumpism-corrupts-spicer-edition/article/2006432
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