White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comments that an ESPN anchor’s intemperate tweet about President Trump constituted a “fireable offense” have fueled the latest media outrage cycle the last few days.
Jemele Hill, a black ESPN reporter, referred to Donald Trump as “a white supremacist” on her personal Twitter account at the beginning of the week. When asked about the tweet on Wednesday, Sanders
The New Republic’s Clio Chang makes the convincing case that Sanders is a more dangerous figure than her more colorful predecessor, Sean Spicer, ever was. She doesn’t aggressively shout down reporters or create a spectacle of herself. The substance, however, is the same: Sanders routinely tells demonstrable lies in the service of the president:
[T]he truth is that she’s better at it than Spicer, who seemed to be tripped up by his lies. Perhaps his stumbles even betrayed his sense of guilt, whereas Sanders shows nothing. She is superior to her predecessors, and thus infinitely worse for the country. This is why her placid gaze is so disturbing: It is the face of a White House whose deceptions and outrages have become all too normal.
Chang notes that Sanders’ down-home, faith-and-family patter when speaking to reporters is a helpful means of obscuring the abnormalities of the White House she serves. (I wonder where she learned that skill.)
Sanders also uses the mouths of babes to gloss over Trump’s horrible policies. When Trump endorsed Tom Cotton and David Perdue’s draconian immigration bill that would have cut legal immigration in half, Sanders started her press briefing by reading from a letter by a 10-year-old named Frank: “It would be my honor to mow the White House lawn for some weekend for you. Even though I’m only 10 I’d like to show the nation what young people like me are ready for.” Later, she tied the immigration bill to Frank’s letter, stating, “It’s our responsibility to keep the American dream alive for kids like Frank, immigrants who are already here and those who dream of immigrating here in the future.”