White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer began his tenure by lying outright about crowd sizes. From there he's settled into a now-familiar routine: every day(-ish), he walks out from the burning garbage fire that is the Donald Trump White House, steps up to the podium, and loudly declares that whatever you think happened during the previous day didn't actually happen.
Today's efforts were grand. Here's Sean Spicer, after being asked about Trump tweeting that a list of major American media outlets were the "enemy of the American people."
He has deep respect for the 1st Amendment, for the role of the press. I've addressed this multiple times in the past. There's a healthy respect for the press, but I think that it's a two-way street [...]
He was asked about the upsurge of anti-Semitism, and what the current White House resident was going to do about that. The answer: He’s a uniter!
The president will do what he's talked about since election night. It's through deed and action, talk about how we can unify this country and speak out against hate, anti-Semitism, racism and he's going to continue to do that. He will show you over the course of months and years through what he does in terms of his policies and his speech that he is going to be a president that brings people together, that unites them and speaks very, very forcefully against those who are seeking to do hate or to tear people down because of their religion or their gender, the color of their skin. Those are all things I think the president has done.
You get the feeling that Sean Spicer has never even met Trump. All right, Sean—what about the statement from the Anne Frank Center blasting xenophobia within the Trump administration?
He has brought a diverse group of folks into his administration, both in terms of actual positions and people he has sought the advice of.
Oh, yeah. Everybody’s been talking about just how diverse Donald Trump’s team is. There are billionaires, and millionaires. There are hard-right white male conservatives, and even harder-right white male conservatives. There are white nationalists, and people who wear Nazi collaboration medals to parties. The whole panoply.
If anything, Sean says, Donald should be pitied:
But it's ironic that no matter how many times he talks about this that it's never good enough.
There was no follow-up asking why, precisely, that was "ironic." There was no time—Spicer was off again, asking why the Anne Frank Center is criticizing Trump instead of heaping praise on him.
Today I think was an unbelievably forceful comment by the president as far as his denunciation of the actions that are currently targeted towards the Jewish community centers. [...] I wish that they had praised the president for his leadership in this area and I think that hopefully as time continues to go by they recognize his commitment to civil rights, to voting rights, to equality for all Americans.
Let's just pause and savor those for a moment. No, really—it’s quite possible that Sean Spicer is unaware that his boss is Donald Trump, the guy from the TV. The guy who, as one of his first actions, sought to make good on his campaign promise to "ban" Muslims.
He then went on to explain that no matter what you have been hearing in the news, Trump's new push to remove undocumented immigrants is targeting those who "pose a threat to public safety." And whether or not you believe the White House on this one is probably colored by whether you believe Sean Spicer on any of the other statements he made while standing at the same podium.