by Sean Spicer
Between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., I would order a takeout dinner (very similar to my lunch choices) from the White House Mess and call the whole press team into my office for a wrap-up meeting to analyze our day and preview what we would likely have to do tomorrow. On a normal night, I’d leave the White House between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., too late to see my kindergarten-aged children before they went to sleep. If I missed my kids for three or four days in a row, I’d pick a day when the president was traveling and no briefing was scheduled (often on days when a foreign leader was visiting) to break away and get home early. But there were times when I’d go an entire week without seeing them, even though I was in town.
Not surprisingly, I often had more “face time” with the president than with my family. Of the countless everyday exchanges I had with him, one stands out—the evening before the White House St. Patrick’s Day Reception in March 2017. The tradition of a White House St. Patrick’s Day celebration began under President Ronald Reagan and has been continued by every president since. In recent years, Ireland’s prime minister, the Taoiseach, has made a point of making an official visit to the White House to join the event.
As I got ready to leave that night, I called the president at the residence.
“Sir, just a reminder about the St. Patrick’s Day event tomorrow—do you have a green tie?”
“Yeah! Of course I have a green tie,” President Trump said.
“For tomorrow?”
A long pause.
“Well, I have one in New York, but I don’t have one here.”
“I’ve got an extra green tie. Would you like me to bring it in?”
“Thanks, sure, but let me see what I can do. It’d be great to have a backup in case I can’t find one. Let’s touch base in the morning.”
I’m thinking to myself, It’s 8:00 p.m., and you are the president. Unless you’re going to dispatch the military to get your green tie, it is not going to get to the White House by tomorrow.
The next morning, I put on a green tie with my suit and packed a second green tie in my bag to take to work with me. First thing that day, I delivered the green tie to the Oval Office and set it on the Resolute desk. The eighth-grade boy in me had to pause for a moment and marvel at the fact that a kid from Rhode Island, who as a student had never seen the inside of the White House, was now making sure that the leader of the free world had the right tie to wear. The billionaire president wore my green tie that entire day, including to the events with the Taoiseach. He must have liked it because I’ve never seen that tie again.
One of the central pledges of the administration was to control the nation’s borders. As with all his campaign pledges, Donald Trump worked hard to see it fulfilled, beginning with more aggressive enforcement of immigration law. The 2015 killing of Kathryn Steinle on a San Francisco pier at the hands of an illegal alien who had already been deported five times was still fresh in the president’s mind. Angered by this and other preventable crimes, the president became especially aggressive in deporting illegals with criminal records. In the first months of his administration, illegal immigration declined, and the nation saw a 53 percent drop in arrests along the Southwest border, a direct result of the deterrent effect of enforcing laws already on the books.1 The immigration issue turned in the president’s favor, though, I think the media and the Democrats were—and are—slow to sense it.
The administration’s redrafted order, which halted visitors from terror-ridden countries in order to give the United States time to develop better vetting procedures before issuing visas, continued to enjoy strong support from the American people. It became increasingly clear that while liberals and the media crowed at federal judges who had struck down previous versions, most Americans considered it a just and fair effort to protect our country.
As Donald Trump acted, the Democrats dug themselves into increasingly extreme positions on certain issues. One was the “sanctuary cities” debate in which municipalities alleged the right to nullify federal law and refused to deport illegal immigrants, including those with criminal histories. When Steinle’s killer, Garcia Zarate, was found not guilty of murder after claiming he had just picked up a Sig Sauer handgun that had been left on Pier 14 and accidently fired it, liberals in San Francisco erupted in a Twitter storm of celebration.
The more the Democrats, especially in California, embraced open borders and nullification, the more popular the president’s approach to immigration became. Today, in fact, some conservative local governments in California are rebelling against the state’s sanctuary policies, calling them dangerous, if not illegal. We all want America to be that shining city on a hill. But most Americans understand that when we fail to enforce our immigration laws and lose control of our borders, and thereby our national security, we endanger one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—the freedom from fear.
The Trump agenda continued to unfold in other ways. The announcement that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change was universally panned by liberals but praised by the Trump base, especially in coal country in West Virginia and Ohio. Whether one agrees or disagrees with that action, it demonstrated an unprecedented resolve by a newly elected president to implement his campaign promises.
The president’s decision to reverse the Obama administration’s executive veto of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines—and the decision to build them with American-made steel—deepened Trump’s connection to blue-collar voters. I couldn’t help but think that if any other administration, especially a Democratic one, had lived up to its promises and solidified its hold on its base so soon, it would have sent the bards of the media into rhapsodies of praise.
Of all the high points I witnessed during my White House tenure, the highest was President Trump’s address to the nation before a joint session of Congress. Stephen Miller was the chief architect of that speech, but it was very much a team effort. Everyone reviewed Stephen’s draft, including staff from the Office of Legislative Affairs, the National Security Council, and other key parts of the administration. And we had a brainstorming session about who should sit as guests in the First Lady’s box, to be acknowledged by the president and incorporated into his speech.
I felt particularly proud to have suggested an early line in the speech that set the bipartisan tone of the evening. But the real game changer was the president himself who took his pen to Stephen’s first draft, rewrote sentences, revised word choices, and inserted new lines and paragraphs.
Reince, Steve Bannon, Jared, Dina Powell, Hope Hicks, Kellyanne, and I sat with the president in the Map Room on the first floor of the residence and further refined the speech. As the president practiced reading the speech on a teleprompter, he made further edits, and I went to work confirming that we had every fact in the speech nailed down, that we were ready to support each theme the president touched on, and that we had an army of surrogates ready to hit the air the minute the president finished.
After the speech, as Trump strode off the floor of the House of Representatives, I walked behind him and followed the president into a hold room that was just off the House floor, accompanied by the vice president and other senior staff. Our mood after the address was even more jubilant than what we felt at the inauguration. It felt like hitting a home run on your birthday and winning the lottery at the same time. I had not seen that many happy faces and high fives since election night. President Trump had done well—and so had our entire team. We shared in the glory.
Everyone—from the mainstream media, to Democrats, and even to Never-Trump Republicans—agreed that the president had done a fantastic job, his delivery and tone were perfect, and his remarks on policy were well thought-out and well stated.
We motorcaded back to the White House, and a small group of us went into the living room in the residence with the president and First Lady to absorb America’s reaction while pilfering cookies and Diet Coke. Looking back, I think it was the best night we had—and the
praise continued for days.
“Trump delivered a grand slam . . .” the New York Post enthused. “[T]he best speech of his life and the most remarkable speech in decades by a chief executive to a joint session of Congress.”
“Trump’s best day in the White House,” declared the Arizona Republic. “This man looked presidential.”
“[S]truck an inspiring, even bipartisan tone,” said the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The president’s “style is direct and not eloquent,” observed the Toledo Blade. “But it is sincere and powerful.”
“If I am the Trump team, I am very happy with this speech,” said Obama’s top strategist, David Axelrod.
“That moment (with Carryn Owens) was one of the most extraordinary moments we have ever seen in American politics,” exclaimed former Obama official Van Jones.
Media around the country was ready to give Trump his due. But not the White House press corps. This had been true from the beginning—not just of his presidency but of his campaign.
Maggie Haberman of the New York Times had been offered an exclusive on Donald Trump’s announcement that he would run for president, but she took a pass because she didn’t think he was credible.
When Katy Tur, a correspondent for NBC News, was asked by her editors to leave London and return to the United States to cover Trump, she reported in her book that she was told it would only be for awhile—the Trump candidacy was not serious.
Whether you support him or not, it’s important to understand the persistent barriers Trump has faced time and again—and surmounted, time and again.
First, he was told by reporters, pundits, and many establishment political types that he would never really run for president—he was just looking for publicity. Then he announced he was running—seriously, more seriously than the press ever understood. Then the narrative was that he would never file a financial disclosure form, which is a presidential candidate requirement. And then he did. Then he was told he would be crushed by the strong Republican field in the early primaries and caucuses. Instead, he kept winning. Then his doubters insisted that, despite these surprising victories, he would never be the Republican nominee. When they were proved wrong on that point, they remained absolutely certain that the Clinton political machine and Hillary’s massive campaign apparatus would destroy him. All the way to election night, the media and so-called experts said Donald Trump had no path to victory; there was no way he could win enough states to reach the required 270 electoral votes. Yet he managed to win 306 electoral votes.
Trump repeatedly proved his critics embarrassingly wrong, but they never gave him credit for it and never stopped criticizing him. Such an endless negative headwind would take its toll on anyone.
Still, at every point, Donald Trump overcame the relentless negativity. I understand that many people, and most reporters and commentators, don’t like him or his policies, but objectively Trump has never received anywhere near the appropriate credit from the mainstream media for his successes. This refusal to report good news about the president is bad for the media’s credibility and certainly bad for their relationship with Donald Trump. He knows—and we certainly experienced this—that many in the media will find a negative angle to every story involving him no matter how positive it might otherwise be. And maybe worse, the media are happy to act as an unofficial adjunct to the Democratic National Committee. That’s not just me saying that—the New York Post made essentially the same point while dissecting the reporting of the New York Times.
Get this from the “Gray Lady” (for younger readers, that is the New York Times): “Despite [President Trump’s] lament that he was handed ‘a mess’ . . . Trump inherited a low unemployment rate” and “a lack of international crises requiring immediate attention.”
As the New York Post pointed out, this is a stunningly brash whitewash of the Obama administration, during which the share of the U.S. population that had given up even looking for work (and so doesn’t count in the unemployment rate) reached historic highs during the most lackluster “recovery” in history.
But beyond that, when it came to a “lack of international crises”: “The Times’ reporters (and editors and fact-checkers) somehow forgot Syria, where nearly a half-million have been killed and whose refugees are overwhelming nations across the region. And also ISIS [later to be evicted from their ‘caliphate’ by Donald Trump], North Korea, Iran, China—and Russia, which the Times now deems quite the threat.”2
The negativity began to influence the coverage of Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, who were former friends of Donald Trump. They were critical of many things then candidate Trump had proposed and said—but they had given him a lot of coverage and airtime, leading some to imagine they were almost Trump boosters in his early phase. Once Trump was in office, however, Mika accused the president of “lying every day and destroying the country.”3 When they criticized the president’s tweets and orders on travel, Trump, who as a candidate had gone out of his way to accommodate their media requests and who regarded them as genuine friends, was hurt and angry by what he regarded as a betrayal.
As Mika and Joe displayed tidbits of inside information, they seemed to the president to be sanctimonious in their conviction that they had full situational awareness of what was happening inside the White House, who was doing what, and what the best solutions were. It sounded to the president as if Mika and Joe kept implying, “If you listened to us, you would be perfect.”
Too many media outlets have adopted, consciously or not, the click-based media attitude that it is more important to be first than to be right. Politico, in my opinion, was the anchor that dragged down media standards and too often read like a tabloid. One of the worst examples was when Politico reporter Julia Ioffe tweeted, “Either Trump is f[***]ing his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”
Ioffe was fired for that post. But given that it was her last day at Politico, the move wasn’t exactly a managerial profile in courage. She was moving on to an even better job at The Atlantic. When I spoke with ex-Politico staffers, they told me that sensationalism and crudity were encouraged as a valued part of that newsroom’s culture. I was on a train heading back to D.C. when I heard about Ioffe’s tweet. I called her soon-to-be new boss at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. We didn’t know each other, but I said we could probably agree that that tweet was entirely unacceptable. To my surprise, Goldberg dismissed it as a mistake that had since been deleted. A mistake, I told him, is getting a fact wrong, misspelling a word, or mixing up two names. What she said, in the crudest terms, about the president and his daughter was, regardless of your politics, disgusting and despicable, and it raised serious questions about Ioffe’s judgment. Jeffrey responded by saying, “Look, why don’t we just move on; we can put this behind us.” I told him, “There’s no moving on. You don’t get to make these kinds of comments, defend them, and then say, ‘Hey, by the way, let’s be buds.’ ” Unreal—a mistake. Her tweet was based on “reporting” that Mrs. Trump was not going to have a First Lady’s office and, instead, Ivanka was taking over the East Wing and creating a First Family’s office, all of which was incorrect information—and still no excuse.
Ioffe now frequently appears on CNN.
By contrast, months later, Goldberg hired a right-leaning (but Trump-hating) writer from National Review. Leftists immediately mounted a campaign to get the new writer fired and found a controversial, anti-abortion tweet in his past. Goldberg promptly fired him.
While I was often at odds with many reporters in the White House press corps, there were many straight-shooting, solid reporters. I did not always agree with their reporting, but generally, I thought, they tried to be objective. Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg, Jon Decker of Fox News Radio, Eamon Javers and Kayla Tausche of CNBC, David Brody of CBN, Steve Holland of Reuters, Margaret Brennan of CBS, John Gizzi of Newsmax, John Roberts of Fox News, Jonathan Swan of Axios, and Sarah Westwood and Gabby Morrongiello of the Washington Exa
miner were some I thought could be tough but fair. And here is one more: Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. It’s no secret that I have had my issues with Maggie’s reporting, and in many cases I believe rightly so. Over time, though, I have realized that while I might not always agree with her reporting—and for very valid reasons—she is a smart and tenacious reporter with good sources. I’ve also realized the importance of listening to each other. Over time—a therapist could have made a fortune from the amount—Maggie and I have learned how to hear and listen to each other, and we have built a more respectful relationship.
That list of reporters is hardly exhaustive, and it is important to note that many reporters are still committed to solid, old-school, shoe-leather journalism that focuses on facts and not conjecture. Interestingly, while a few of those reporters are from television, many that I mentioned aren’t. I’ve noticed over time that there are two types of journalists—those who are curious, ask tough questions, take time to get the facts right, and love the thrill of writing a complete and interesting story and those who want to make a name for themselves and become famous (usually by appearing on TV).
One group that I find interesting is the self-appointed “fact checkers” of the Washington Post and other media outlets, who could learn a thing or two from their more careful brethren.
For example, when Vice President Pence said there are more Americans at work today than ever before, the Washington Post “fact checker” Nicole Lewis took him to task for failing to note that the United States population has risen, swelling the numbers of those at work. The vice president was awarded three “Pinocchios” out of four for “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” when, in fact, what he had said was the plain truth, though Lewis made a fair point about context. When someone tells the truth and the Washington Post deems that person a three-Pinnocchio liar, is that “fact checking” or partisan nitpicking?