With Sarah Sanders leaving the White House, Trump now lies alone
Listening to White House reporters complain about Sarah Sanders, the outgoing White House press secretary, has always reminded me of an old joke about two old women dining at a bad restaurant.
"The food at this place is just terrible," one says. “And such small portions!" replies the second.
And so it was with Sanders, the combative, no-holds barred spokesperson for President Trump for the last two years. Not only did she put the “brief” in briefings by giving so few, they were full of falsehoods and misrepresentations when she did.
Sanders says her last day will be at the end of the month, but in reality she left the job months ago. Here we are in mid-June and there have been just two briefings this year. She was notorious for not returning calls or emails sent by reporters asking for a comment on this or that — and then complaining, as President Trump often does, that no one bothered to ask for a comment.
Not surprisingly, reaction to her pending departure has come down squarely on one side or the other. There’s no gray area here:
“She always kept her composure and she was always right on money with what she said,” claimed Fox News’s Jesse Watters.
“Sarah Sanders presided over the destruction of one of the grand stages of the American presidency, and one of the great platforms for the projection of United States power: the White House briefing room,” countered Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University.
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To me, this was never about left vs. right, pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump. It’s about truth vs. non-truth. Just for a moment, put your hyperpartisan views aside and simply examine some of the things she said.
She denied knowledge of President Trump’s hush-money payoffs — even though the president himself admitted making them.
She insisted that Trump had never “promoted or encouraged violence,” even though Trump, on tape, has done so on numerous occasions.
And who can forget, during her interview by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, that she admitted lying about former FBI Director James Comey?
On and on and on. I have found the “fake news” meme uttered so often by the president and Sanders ironic because they themselves are prodigious manufacturers and distributors of falsehoods.
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I concede that being press secretary to the president of the United States is a tough job. It’s a real pressure cooker. The hours are brutal. You have to be knowledgeable on scores of subjects. The phone calls and emails never stop. We’re all human and slips of the tongue can occur. But Sanders went well beyond this: She frankly made stuff up.
Again: This isn’t a left/right, or pro/anti Trump dynamic. It is truth vs. not truth. Credibility is the coin of the realm here, and once that’s gone, it’s gone. I suspect that one reason Sanders stopped briefings is because she had been caught in too many lies; her credibility had been shot.
Where do we go from here? I’m not even sure Trump, who has upended numerous presidential traditions, needs a formal spokesman. He is his own spokesman. For all his media bashing, he talks with newspaper and TV reporters fairly often. When he walks to Marine One, he’ll usually stop and talk with us for 15 or 20 minutes. It’s a shout fest, but Donald Trump speaking off the cuff always generates news.
Of course, much of what he says is dishonest — The Washington Post reports the number of “false or misleading claims" the president has made has now topped the 10,000 mark — which raises the question: why does Trump need a spokesperson to lie on his behalf when he’s so accomplished at it himself?
Paul Brandus, founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports, is the author of "Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency" and is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: With Sarah Sanders leaving the White House, Trump now lies alone
