Here’s a sampling of how Trump has undercut or humiliated his top spokespeople and officials since taking office.
As the Trump Train chugs along with service delays and occasional derailments, the commander-in-chief keeps throwing his surrogates and aides beneath it — dispatching them to push absurd fallacies or positions he contradicts a day later.
“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” President Trump tweeted last week.
Here’s a sampling of how Trump has undercut or humiliated his top spokespeople and officials since taking office:
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer emerged from the wrong side of the bed Jan. 21 to scorch the media in a combative first press briefing — and falsely claim Trump’s day-earlier inauguration had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”
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Flanked by enlarged aerial photos of the National Mall and clad in an ill-fitting suit, Spicer advanced a dubious set of arguments involving plastic floor coverings, magnetometers and Metro ridership stats — all to soothe his new boss’ bruised ego.
“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong, ” he said.
The electoral college victor refused to accept he hadn’ t also won the popular vote — so he insisted he would have, if not for “the millions of people who voted illegally.” He later placed the alleged figure between 3 and 5 million.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, multiple independent studies have shown. Yet Spicer was again saddled with defending a false claim, bravely taking the podium to spin the un-spinnable.
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“The President does believe that, I think he’s stated that before, and stated his concern of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign, and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have brought to him, ” he said in late January.
Spicer wasn’ t the only fall guy. After Trump alleged voter fraud had cost him and then-Sen. Kelly Ayotte wins in New Hampshire, White House policy adviser Stephen Miller in February claimed the issue was “very real” and “very serious” during an interview with ABC’s “This Week” — but repeatedly refused to supply any evidence.
Or is it? Trump and his spokesman appeared to have one of their classic misunderstandings in the wake of his Jan. 27 executive order temporarily restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim nations.
The President called his action a “ban” in a Jan. 30 tweet and in remarks two days earlier. Top aide Kellyanne Conway, too, called the order “a ban on travel” that weekend.
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But Spicer took to the briefing room lectern on Jan. 31 to insist it was not, in fact, a “travel ban.”
“It can’ t be a ban if you’ re letting a million people in, ” he said, adding the President in his tweet was just “using the words that the media is using.”
Trump, thankfully, put the matter to bed on Twitter: “Everybody is arguing whether or not it is a BAN. Call it what you want, it is about keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of country!” he wrote Feb. 1.
Trump, in a May 4 appearance with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, told the head of state “you have better health care than we do.”
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As Australia boasts a universal, single-payer system, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders played down the President’s praise in a day-later briefing.
“I think he was simply being complimentary of the prime minister and I don’ t think it was much more than that, ” she said. “The President was complimenting a foreign leader on the operations of their health care system and it didn’ t mean anything more than that.”
Trump contradicted Sanders on Twitter later that day: “Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do –everybody does. ObamaCare is dead!” he wrote. “But our healthcare will soon be great.”
The POTUS thrust his surrogates into turmoil last week with his surprise firing of now-former FBI Director James Comey, who had led the investigation into Team Trump’s potential Russia ties.
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Trump, in a May 9 letter to Comey, initially cited Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation that the agency head be axed over mishandling the probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Conway on CNN promoted the narrative Trump had fired Comey on Rosenstein’s recommendation, as did Vice President Mike Pence to reporters the next morning. Sanders, during the press briefing that afternoon, also supplied that explanation.
Then, naturally, Trump drove a bulldozer through it all: “He made a recommendation, but regardless of recommendation I was going to fire Comey, ” he told NBC News’ Lester Holt on Thursday.
The revelation that Trump had disclosed highly classified intelligence to Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting last week wrangled new scapegoats into the mix — chiefly National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who’ d thus far in his tenure maintained sterling credibility.
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“The President and the foreign minister reviewed common threats from terrorist organizations to include threats to aviation, ” the retired general said in a statement. “At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also maintained Trump hadn’ t discusssed “sources, methods or military operations, ” while Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell said “the story is false.”
Cue Trump trampling their carefully crafted explanations with — what else — some tweets.
“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W. H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety, ” he wrote Wednesday morning.
