Key to success: When Trump says something indefensible, just pretend he said something else.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer seemed to find his groove Tuesday. What’s his new secret? When President Trump says something indefensible, just pretend he said something else.
Here is a tweet Trump sent Friday afternoon:
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes , @NBCNews , @ABC , @CBS , @CNN ) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
Here is the first question Spicer received at Tuesday’s news briefing, from LifeZette’s Jim Stinson: “I was curious if the president regrets or wants to clarify his characterization … of the media as an enemy of the American people.”
And here is how Spicer responded:
I think the president has been very clear that certain outlets have gone out of their way to not represent his record accurately, and it is a concern to him. And I think some reporters — he has deep respect for the First Amendment, for the role of the press. I’ve addressed this multiple times in the past. He has a healthy respect for the press. But it is a two-way street, as I’ve also said before. And I think that the president understands that certain outlets have gone out of their way to not be completely accurate and fair in their coverage of what’s going on.
Cool. But Trump didn’t actually say what Spicer said he said. The president didn’t say he respects the press but is concerned about “certain outlets” going “out of their way” to cover him unfairly and inaccurately. That kind of complaint would have been filed under Stuff Every Politician Says All the Time. It would have been totally unremarkable. Journalists might have disagreed with his assessment, but they would not have been alarmed. They are accustomed to griping.
[ Kellyanne Conway isn’t even trying to defend Donald Trump anymore. She’s pretending he’s someone else. ]
Trump took griping to another level when he described CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and the New York Times as “the enemy of the American people.”
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace put it like this Sunday:
We criticize presidents. They want to criticize us back, that’s fine. But when he said that “the fake news media is not my enemy, it’s the enemy of the American people,” I believe that crosses an important line.
There really is no good defense for a statement as over-the-top as the one Trump tweeted. So, Spicer defended a tamer, more reasonable statement — one the president didn’t actually make — instead.
