Sean Spicer was no victim. He willingly served a president who asked him over and over again to lie. Rather than resist or quit, he repeatedly stood behind the podium, the face and voice of the White House, and lied
.. Spicer defended Trump’s lie about how there were three million fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.
.. He spent weeks using shifting stories to defend Trump’s lie about President Barack Obama wiretapping Trump Tower.
.. He lied about the nature of the meeting at Trump Tower in June, 2016, between senior Trump-campaign officials and several people claiming to have information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. “There was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for discussion about adoption,”
.. He insulted and demeaned the free press, continuing an unprecedented assault on objective sources of truth.
.. Melissa McCarthy, in her uproarious impersonation of Spicer (or more like an inhabiting of Spicer) on “Saturday Night Live,” arguably did more than any single human in peeling the bark off the dishonest press secretary. She exposed the peculiar mix of
- inarticulateness,
- obnoxiousness and
- duplicitousness
that defined not only Spicer but also his boss.
..he fellowship for Spicer will be viewed as “honorific,” and hence a validation of his actions, which are defined almost entirely by the lies he told. Harvard absolutely should invite those who have served in this administration, although I grant you, the pickings are slim. But why not invite Sally Yates or James B. Comey? They’d surely have important lessons to depart about the obligations of public servants
Trump begins ‘negging’ portion of NAFTA negotiations
Ahead of the meeting between Mexico, Canada and the USA in Mexico City to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Act, Trump has begun what he terms the ‘negging’ portion of the trade negotiations.
The President is said to have discovered the term, which describes bringing down someone’s self esteem by making snide comments to make them more vulnerable to manipulation, in a book called The Game by “pick up artist” Neil Strauss. Trump has been applying this technique in his communication with his children, business partners and now sovereign countries.
.. Donald Trump Jr “everytime I call him he answers the phone by saying how happy he is to speak to his 4th favourite child. But I know he’s just building a strong negotiating position for when I ask him for a business advice, or a hug.”
.. Other examples of Trump’s presidential negging includes pretending to not remember Mitch McConnell’s name and telling French president Macron that he’s “so smart, like Kellyanne Conway smart”
.. Mexican president Pena Nieto chose not to respond to a twitter DM that asked if negotiations would be in Spanish or a “real” language.
.. “Although it is common for governments to try to project strength ahead of negotiations, it is unusual for them to do it in such a petty and childish way.”
Trump’s Lawyers Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous
As Mueller’s probe expands, the president’s legal team is treading carefully... Back in June, Donald Trump was still treating the Russia investigation like some sort of defamation suit, one of a countless number of lawsuits that Trump has been involved in over the years. The first attorney he retained to lead his legal team, Marc Kasowitz, was his longtime personal lawyer from his New York real-estate days, and he responded as if former F.B.I. director James Comey’s sworn Senate testimony was just another meritless claim he could dismiss with a cease-and-desist letter. “Comey’s excuse for this unauthorized disclosure of privileged information . . . appears to be entirely retaliatory,” Kasowitz said in a statement at the time, reflexively going on the offensive. “We will leave it [to] the appropriate authorities to determine whether this leaks [sic] should be investigated along with all those others being investigated.”.. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury, and Jay Sekulow, who occupies the role of Trump’s “TV lawyer,” defending the president on news shows, has apparently tempered his rhetoric... Despite their best efforts, they’re dealing with a client who is almost pathologically incapable of telling the same story twice. When he fired Comey, Trump made his situation worse by offering a constantly evolving set of justifications for his dismissal... A similar problem arose when Sekulow went from claiming that Trump played no role in crafting Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower last year, to the White House claiming that Trump helped “as any father would.”
Parents should be repulsed by Trump’s playing of the father card
“The president weighed in just as any father would, based on the limited information that he had,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, effectively confirming The Post’s report that President Trump personally drafted Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his meeting with a Russian lawyer proffering dirt on Hillary Clinton.
.. “As any father would.” Fathers are supposed to teach their children the difference between right and wrong. My father taught me not to lie. Donald Trump Jr.’s father taught him to shade the truth — in this case, so much that it was in total eclipse. “The statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement,” Sanders said. No technical inaccuracy, perhaps, but little actual truth.
“Primarily’’ was the tell, the classic Trumpian hedge behind which Sanders so unconvincingly hid.
.. Fathers are supposed to put their children’s well-being above their own; that selflessness is the essence of being a parent. Trump Jr.’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, told The Post that he and his client had been “fully prepared and absolutely prepared to make a fulsome statement” about the meeting. Then the president intervened, dictating edits in the statement to his aide Hope Hicks, and gambling foolishly that the real facts wouldn’t emerge.
.. When, inevitably, they did, it made Trump Jr. look bad — “If it’s what you say, I love it,” he told the Russian attorney of her Clinton offer — but also provided evidence of some willingness on the part of the Trump campaign to collude with the Russians. Whose interest was the president so frantically scrambling to protecting here, his son’s or his own?