When journalists pointed out that Hitler had ordered millions of Jews gassed to death, Spicer said that at least he moved them to “Holocaust centers.”
“I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers,” Spicer said,
.. Are we supposed to conclude that it’s worse to drop bombs on people than to ship them in cattle cars to murder factories?
Bannon’s Out. But Did H.R. McMaster Win?
in mid-March, General McMaster tried to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Mr. Cohen-Watnick, a holdover from Michael Flynn’s aborted stint as national security adviser, complained to Mr. Bannon and Jared Kushner, who prevailed on Mr. Trump to have him reinstated.
The idea that the 30-year-old Mr. Cohen-Watnick should be senior director for intelligence programs — a position held by senior career C.I.A. officers in the Obama administration and others — is dubious. Furthermore, General McMaster’s decision to get rid of Mr. Cohen-Watnick was well within his pay grade.
.. A few days after his reinstatement, Mr. Cohen-Watnick was one of three White House staffers who facilitated a briefing to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes on the “incidental surveillance” of Trump campaign staff members, which Mr. Nunes used to distract news media and public attention from the committee’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
A little unpacking revealed how artlessly pretextual this distraction was: Mr. Nunes professed the need to learn new information about surveillance to warn the president, yet that very information was in the possession of the White House and accessible to Mr. Trump without Mr. Nunes’s intervention.
.. One defensible inference is that Mr. Trump wanted to keep a pliable ally as the White House’s principal liaison with the intelligence community.
To arrange Mr. Trump’s reversal of General McMaster’s dismissal of Mr. Cohen-Watnick, Mr. Bannon required no formal position on the National Security Council. Indeed, Mr. Cohen-Watnick’s other inside patron — Mr. Kushner — had no such position.
.. Rex W. Tillerson blithely channeled buzz phrases like “win-win solutions” and “mutual respect” in describing United States-China relations. The phraseology seemed to signal United States capitulation to China’s sphere-of-influence geopolitical stance
.. Matt Pottinger, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, had warned in a memo against using such language. The fact that no one seems to have paid him any heed suggests how little the council matters in the Trump White House.
.. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, implied it would be “silly” to advocate regime change due to the absence of practical alternatives. The next day, Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, in an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, struck a very different chord by condemning the regime and saying that the United States could take unilateral action should the Security Council fail to respond effectively. (Mr. Trump then dialed up his own language, saying his attitude toward Syria had “changed very much.”)
In each case, the stated position of one national security player did not mesh with that of another.
Among the National Security Council’s key tasks is to help the president arrive at a consensus on a given foreign policy issue by soliciting the views of different agencies and orchestrating compromises in formulating a clear and integrated approach.
.. And perhaps a lack of policy coordination is just the way it is in the Trump administration. But if that is the case, the situation calls into question the National Security Council’s very utility.
..
But for the institution to have real value, regardless of who the players are, Mr. Trump himself needs to respect it more than he apparently does.
Sean Spicer loses his cool: ‘Stop shaking your head’
But the exchange with Ryan sure seemed to venture into different territory. Instructing her to stop shaking her head came off as demeaning, and a number of White House reporters took issue with it on social media.
.. What’s even more puzzling about it is that Spicer continues to point to the lack of evidence of collusion while ignoring the fact that the FBI is investigating possible ties between Trump and Russia. The idea that an FBI investigation involving the administration doesn’t amount to a hill of beans just doesn’t make much sense. Yet the mere premise that Russia is an issue for the White House seemed to set Spicer off.
The Most Abused Press Secretary in History
Sean Spicer, meet Ron Ziegler.
.. Nixon didn’t value that perspective, though—“The press is the enemy … write that on a blackboard a hundred times,” he once told Kissinger.
.. In the week after the Watergate arrests in June 1972, as the news broke that the burglars had ties to the Nixon reelection campaign, Nixon ordered Ziegler to minimize the crime. He did so memorably, dismissing it as a “third-rate alleged burglary attempt.” When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the story, Ziegler accused them of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”
.. he continued to duck and weave in Spicer-like fashion, and even introduced his own “alternative facts” into the lexicon of politics, begrudgingly declaring the president’s long-standing insistence of White House guiltlessness “inoperative.” “If my answers sound confusing,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him saying during a 1974 White House briefing just a few months before Nixon resigned, “I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing and the situation is confusing—and I’m not in a position to clarify it.”
.. Praise and censure in the Nixon years were parceled out according to an aide’s willingness to defy the hated press—a pattern that has also been attributed to Trump.
.. Ziegler was just 29 years old when he became the White House press secretary. It was a job that most thought would go to Herb Klein, a former Southern California newsman and longtime campaign spokesman for Nixon, but the new president wanted someone more compliant. Ziegler’s inexperience was itself seen as an insult by the White House press corps
.. Most of the press corps began by treating Ziegler like a puppy-dog frontman, recognizing his advertising background and low rating in the inner circle to be the insult it really was,” Safire recalled.