President Trump Just Hung Sean Spicer Out to Dry Again
Sean Spicer, Trump Press Secretary, Is 'Not Here to Be Someone'southward Buddy'
WASHINGTON — In his first, rocky calendar week as President Trump's press secretarial assistant, Sean M. Spicer was scolded by his boss, pilloried as a liar, hammered by journalists, mocked by Stephen Colbert, taunted by the flash-frozen ice cream brand Dippin' Dots and held up as the poster child for an administration that can play fast and loose with the facts.
No wonder he was looking for his flak jacket.
"Is this bulletproof?" Mr. Spicer asked ane afternoon terminal calendar week, peering into a closet in his sparse West Wing role every bit he hunted for the gainsay vest that, by derisive tradition, is passed down from i presidential spokesman to the next.
Until recently, Mr. Spicer was the public vocalisation and principal strategist of the Republican National Committee, the epitome of institution Washington. Now he is the face of an assistants bent on upending the status quo and waging state of war on the news media, surprising colleagues hither with how comfortably he has embraced Mr. Trump'southward ire toward the press.
The 24-hour interval later the inauguration, he marched into the White Firm briefing room on Mr. Trump's orders and lambasted stunned reporters as "quack" while claiming, against available evidence, that the inauguration had been the near attended in history. (He later on said his count included viewers watching online.) The ironic hashtag #spicerfacts was soon trending online.
Days later, Mr. Spicer defended Mr. Trump'south false claims about rampant voter fraud, referring to studies that do not back upwards the exclamation and proverb the president "believes what he believes." On Thursday, he had to walk back his proposition that Mr. Trump would impose a major tax on Mexican imports, jolting global markets.
The reaction has been harsh.
"In that location's no learning curve on a moral compass," said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who has advised Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio. "You don't demand a learning bend to tell the truth from fiction."
If he'southward bothered by the blowback, Mr. Spicer, 45, who had long dreamed of standing behind the White House lectern, is non showing it.
"We take a free press — I get it," Mr. Spicer said last week during an interview in his office, where a giant television set broadcasts four cable-news stations at once. "But the press doesn't like information technology when you lot call out their errors the same way they telephone call out everyone else's."
Statements from the White House, Mr. Spicer argued, should be given the aforementioned leeway afforded a news arrangement. "I don't know how many corrections are in The New York Times any given day," Mr. Spicer said. "But I don't wake upward every day and go, 'O.K., you lot're all liars.'"
Over a half-hr conversation, Mr. Spicer — who ate soft-serve water ice cream from a loving cup branded with the presidential seal — was by turns defensive and relaxed, and still excited by the novelty of working in the Due west Wing. Grabbing a history book, he flipped to a folio with a listing of previous printing aides. "Diane Sawyer had that office!" he said, proudly.
A framed photograph of himself at the White House lectern, taken days before, was displayed on a mantel. A note from Barack Obama'south press secretary, Josh Earnest, was nearby. "It was very, 'What an astonishing laurels it is,'" Mr. Spicer said of the letter.
Asked if he was bothered by Mr. Trump's unpredictable Twitter posts, Mr. Spicer shrugged. "You get the ability to wake up and accept an issue or an idea become front end and centre in a second," he said. "That's a huge thing."
The president "drives the news," Mr. Spicer said. "I aid provide updates."
A stocky Navy reservist who grew up in middle-class Rhode Island, Mr. Spicer prides himself on persistence. He attended a prestigious Cosmic high schoolhouse on a scholarship, sending away for brochures for the schoolhouse without his parents' knowledge. After graduating from Connecticut Higher, he bounced around working on campaigns, briefly living in an R.5. without heat or hot h2o.
Years ago, a line drive at a softball game smacked into Mr. Spicer's jaw, leaving his oral fissure wired shut for weeks. "Be careful," his teammate told doctors on the way to the hospital. "He talks for a living."
He climbed his way upwardly the Washington ladder, representing Republicans in Congress before landing in the office of the United States merchandise representative in the George Due west. Bush-league administration. His jaw has since recovered: The Washington Post reported that Mr. Spicer chews, and swallows whole, more than than 20 pieces of Orbitz cinnamon gum a day.
Epitome
He is nonetheless finding his place in Mr. Trump'southward ever-shifting inner circle. A Washington insider among political outsiders, Mr. Spicer joined the Trump campaign in August, against the advice of friends who warned against tying himself to an unpredictable candidate.
On the eve of the election, Mr. Spicer privately told several journalists that Mr. Trump's odds of victory were slim. Expressing those misgivings may have been a move to soften the blow to the party in case of a Trump defeat, but was the sort of disloyalty that is anathema in Trump World.
"Sometimes he was a footling less enthusiastic about our direction than other times," said Stephen Thou. Bannon, Mr. Trump's principal strategist. "Only he hung in there."
Mr. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, rarely speaks to reporters on the record. Only he reached out to a reporter unprompted to praise Mr. Spicer after learning of this profile, a sign of the Trump White Business firm's support for Mr. Spicer afterwards a tumultuous first calendar week.
Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Spicer's initial fiery appearance in the White House briefing room, urging him to clothing a sharper suit and appear more confident, according to a person with noesis of the conversations. ("He was disappointed with how the overall news cycle was going," Mr. Spicer said in the interview, declining to elaborate.)
Simply Mr. Trump was pleased with Mr. Spicer's follow-up briefing on Monday, calling Mr. Spicer a "superstar."
"He'due south a fighter," Mr. Bannon said in a telephone interview, during which he also urged the news media to "keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while."
"Sean Spicer is much besides polite to the media," Mr. Bannon added. "I'm the guy who wanted them out of the building." (He was referring to a proposal, scrapped for now, to move the White House briefing room from its current West Wing home.)
Mr. Spicer has also heard from supporters who say his dressing-down of the news media was long overdue.
"Accountability goes both ways," said former Representative Mike Pappas, a New Jersey Republican who hired Mr. Spicer in the 1990s, adding that Mr. Spicer's complaints were dead-on.
"At that place's a clear bias against people similar me, and people like him, and people like the man he works for," Mr. Pappas said. "You have a right to your bias, but don't report information technology as factual."
Clifford Hobbins, Mr. Spicer'due south high school history instructor, dismissed questions nearly his onetime student's integrity. "He is equally honest as the mean solar day is long," said Mr. Hobbins, who said he had voted for Mr. Trump. "I've been very proud of the way he handled himself."
Mr. Spicer, who was barely known outside Washington, is notwithstanding adjusting to national fame. More than v million people tuned in for his first formal press briefing concluding calendar week, with cable news channels and some circulate networks taking the proceedings live.
The discovery that he had posted on Twitter multiple times about his disdain for Dippin' Dots, and its slogan, "The Ice Cream of the Future," prompted the company to send him an open up letter that went viral. Mr. Spicer sounded exasperated when the field of study came up.
"Information technology's a joke," he said. "How long can they exist 'the ice cream of the hereafter'? Y'all tin't actually be the hereafter forever."
Finishing his ice cream — which was not flash-frozen — Mr. Spicer shrugged. "You're not here to exist someone's buddy. You're here to enact the president's agenda," he said of his task. "And if you call up information technology'south going to exist anything bad, then this isn't the job for you."
Still, when asked about his kickoff weekend, when he blasted the news media on instructions from an aggrieved boss, Mr. Spicer immune himself a grimace. "That wasn't the Sabbatum I idea I was waking up to," he said.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/business/media/sean-spicer-trump-press-secretary-is-not-here-to-be-someones-buddy.html
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