Sarah
Sanders was a prolific liar for Trump. And she did even more damage.
Opinion by
Columnist
June 14, 2019 at 11:43 a.m. CDT
President Trump has
stocked his administration with a unique collection of the incompetent, the malevolent and the corrupt — as well as some people who
were all three. But there’s a different and rare
class of Trump aide who deserves special condemnation: Those who were actually
good at their jobs.
The most visible of
them is leaving, as the president announced on Thursday:
....She is a very special person with
extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job! I hope she decides to
run for Governor of Arkansas - she would be fantastic. Sarah, thank you for a
job well done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019
Trump has every
reason to be thankful, since Sarah Sanders has been probably the most dishonest
White House press secretary in history. Which, when you’re serving the most
dishonest president in history, is what the job requires. But what made her so
valuable to Trump was the enthusiasm with which she embraced a task that, to
anyone with any principles, should have been a horror.
There isn’t nearly
enough time to document the entire mountain of falsehoods Sanders
served up even before she stopped doing press briefings altogether three months
ago. But it’s worth reminding ourselves of a few. Take a deep breath:
- When Trump fired
FBI director James B. Comey in May 2017, Sanders said, “I’ve heard from countless
members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the President’s
decision."
- Under
questioning from the special counsel, she admitted that her Comey
statement was a lie, but called it a “slip of the tongue,” despite the
fact that she had repeated the false claim multiple times.
- She denied that the president
dictated a false statement for his son to release in an attempt to deceive
the public about the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a group
of Russians, when the president’s lawyers later admitted that he had
dictated the statement.
- In June 2017,
she said, “The
president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged
violence. If anything, quite the contrary,” when we’ve all seen the
president promote and encourage violence multiple times.
- She denied that Trump was involved
in the $130,000 hush-money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
- She claimed that immigrants who come
to the United States via the diversity lottery are not vetted, which is a
lie.
- She claimed that “multiple news
outlets” had reported that President Barack Obama ordered Trump’s phones
tapped in 2016, which was a lie.
- She insisted that it was perfectly
fine for the president to retweet fake videos intended to create fear and
hatred of Muslims, because “whether it’s a real video, the threat is
real.”
- She claimed in January that 4,000
suspected terrorists were arrested coming across the southern border last
year, an utterly bogus statistic.
- And she said, “the President also believes in
making sure that information is accurate before pushing it out as fact
when it certainly and clearly is not.” Yeah.
Beyond the specific
lies, the character of Sanders’ interactions with journalists was unusually
destructive. She treated the media with open contempt — not just as individual
people, but the entire enterprise in which they are engaged. She insulted them,
demeaned them, and generally acted as though they were nothing but irritants
who had no right to raise questions that might undermine anyone’s worship of
the glorious perfection that is Donald Trump.
It’s tempting to give
Sanders credit for displaying skill in an extraordinarily difficult task. After
all, how many people could do as good a job defending so dishonest a president?
When, day after day, you’re confronted with provable lies that your boss has
told, and manage to justify them without curling into a fetal position on the
floor or tearing out of the White House in a panic, it’s an achievement.
But the fact that Sanders
did her job so well is precisely the problem. Only a moral degenerate would
have been capable of it.
Let’s recall the
brief and disastrous tenure of her predecessor, Sean Spicer. What made Spicer’s time as
White House press secretary so cringeworthy was a mutual awareness among him,
the reporters asking him questions, and the public watching at home: He was
lying, we knew he was lying, and he knew that we knew he was lying. And because
he knew that we knew he was lying, he was embarrassed. He sweated, he
stuttered, he shouted, he seemed always to be teetering on the brink of a
breakdown.
His shame was evident
for all to see.
I’m not saying Spicer
is some kind of admirable figure. He chose to work for Trump and chose to
repeat Trump’s lies, two sins that should never be forgiven. But he was so
terrible at it precisely because, somewhere inside him, there pulsed a weakened
but living shred of a conscience, trying with its last remaining energy to
force its way to the surface.
Sarah Sanders was not
so burdened. She showed no conscience and no shame. She was smooth and calm and
collected as she served up poisonous lies and infinite bad faith to the public.
She was exactly what Trump wanted and all he could ever have asked for.
In a more just world,
Sanders would be shamed and shunned forever. She wouldn’t be able to get a job,
her neighbors would avoid her, and she would be regarded with the universal
contempt she has so richly earned.
But, as this is not a
just world, Sanders will prosper. Corporations will pay generously for her
advice on how they can more effectively mislead and misinform the public.
Future Republican
candidates will seek out her wise counsel. Who knows, she may even run for
governor of Arkansas, as Trump suggested, and in a state Trump won by 27 points
in 2016, she might win.
Her future success is
assured, which is a tribute to how the Republican Party has embraced Trumpism
in all its moral squalor. It’s no wonder the president is so thankful.