by Sean Spicer
After substantial criticism, a Washington Post editor added, “[T]he fact that Pence’s remark elicited applause was a strong indication that it was misleading.”4 Really? Did the fact checkers rate President Obama’s applause lines the same way? Actually, surprise, they didn’t. David Harsanyi at The Federalist noted this:
Obama was constantly offering simplistic claims about the state of the economy. Without offering any context, the former president would take credit for authoring the greatest economic recovery in history. While this statement was technically true—certainly undeserving of three Pinocchios—Obama also happened to have prevailed over the worst economic recovery in history, despite the fact that, historically speaking, the worse the recession the stronger the recovery. Not once that I can tell did the former president mention that weak labor force participation rates helped bolster his impressive unemployment numbers.5
Or consider how AP fact checkers treated this statement from President Trump: “There has never been a presidency that’s done so much in such a short period of time.” You could fairly criticize that statement as political hyperbole (especially if you didn’t like what the president was doing). You could also defend it (given not just the president’s flurry of executive orders and the bills he had signed into law, but his ambitious initiatives that were getting underway in various departments). But AP fact checkers Jim Drinkard and Calvin Woodward made the following response: “THE FACTS: Trump’s first month has been consumed by a series of missteps and firestorms and produced less legislation of significance than Obama enacted during his first month.”6
Is that a fact? Or is that an opinion? It is the latter if you regard the signature acts of the administration’s first month as irrelevant, which is what these “fact checkers” did. In reality, most mainstream media fact checkers are opinion checkers.
Early on, I realized there were no less than four things that distorted the White House press corps’ coverage of the Trump administration. They are the following:
1. An unshakable focus on palace intrigue (who’s up and who’s down) over substantive stories—something I first encountered when Kaitlan Collins got attacked for asking a question about national security at a press conference with the president and the Canadian prime minister rather than asking a question about General Flynn. Because she failed to follow the media herd, she was attacked—and since then has turned into one of the president’s fiercest critics . . . .and moved to CNN.
2. A desire to break a story rather than doing real reporting and journalism to get a story right.
3. The desire to use cameras to become a cable star by generating fake controversy and outrage. In this category, I put not only Jim Acosta but also April Ryan and Brian Karem. Both April and Brian (who is the freelance reporter for Playboy) are veterans of the briefing room. April and I had a very public back and forth about her shaking her head in response to an answer I was giving, and Brian had his moment in a similar circumstance when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was at the podium. After both instances, these veteran reporters were offered cable contracts on CNN. Let’s be clear—they were offered TV contracts not because they broke a story or won an award based on great sources. They got these contracts for making a scene, for making themselves the story. Think about that for a second—is that what being a reporter is all about? I saw how reporters, who had been attending these briefings for years, were suddenly thrilled to be recognized on the street. But they weren’t being recognized for their reporting; they were being noticed for their place in the briefing room.
4. And finally, a partisan, pack mentality. One that decides it is necessary to litigate everything Republicans say and do to the nth degree but has limited curiosity about the shortcomings and outright scandals of the Obama administration, Democrats, or the Left.
If you doubt this, imagine the media reaction if the Obama administration’s IRS scandal—using the power of the audit to punish political enemies with willful lying to Congress and destruction of subpoenaed evidence—had occurred under the Trump administration. The media would have howled and demanded a special prosecutor. But during the Obama administration, the importance of the investigation—and scandal—was downplayed by most members of the media.
If I was as wrong in my understanding of the electorate as the media has been, at some point I would ask myself whether I needed to find better sources. Instead, when confronted with political realities they don’t like, many journalists seek the comfort and reassurance of the herd. And when they get it wrong, the herd closes ranks.
Pity the press secretary who broaches, ever so gently, such criticisms of the media. Those who do will immediately be told that they are a threat to the First Amendment. The media criticizes freely (as it should) and also freely questions motives (as it is allowed to under the First Amendment). But the media regards any questioning or examination of its own motives to be beyond question. In the minds of many in the press, the First Amendment is solely about them and their rights. In reality, it’s about all of us and our ability to express ourselves. I believe that a free press is crucial to a robust democracy. But the same First Amendment that allows the media freedom to print or broadcast a story also affords me freedom to critique it, to state denials when they report something wrong, and to offer corrections when they make mistakes. We all know that freedoms come with limits and responsibilities and can have consequences and repercussions, which is why we have professional standards and why journalists should strive to be correct and open, like everyone else, to criticism.
In an attempt to get the media to focus on issues of substance rather than palace intrigue, our communications staff often tried to establish legislative themes. Every Monday morning, we dispatched talking points to House and Senate leaders and key staff members to coordinate the week’s message. We had Energy Week, Workforce Week, and the like, but as Congressman Thomas Massie told The Hill, “It might as well be Easter Bunny Week” as far as the media is concerned.
Kellyanne once told ABC’s Good Morning America, “Even when you look at the network coverage: in a five-week period between May and June, 353 minutes spent covering Russia, FBI, Comey—a totally fantastical, hypothetical charade. Less than a minute spent on tax reform, five minutes spent on jobs. I mean, this is the culture we live in now.”7
Then there were random acts of sheer media meanness in the style of Julia Ioffe.
About Jared Kushner, Chris Matthews remarked, “So the son-in-law—you know, one good thing Mussolini did was execute his son-in-law.”8
Reza Aslan, CNN’s “religious scholar,” tweeted, “Like a piece of s[**]t father, like a piece of s[**]t son.”
No one went over the line, however, like Kathy Griffin, who posted the infamous photo of herself holding a realistic-looking bloodied head of Donald Trump, ISIS-style. Both Aslan and Griffin were let go by CNN and tried to position themselves as media martyrs. In each of these incidents of media meanness, the culprit usually, but not always, apologizes and moves on.
The annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner used to be one of the prime events on Washington’s spring social calendar. Every year, a comedian is chosen to rake over the incumbent president and other newsmakers, and reporters bring guests that include Hollywood stars, big money advertisers, and even fellow reporters.
Given the media’s unprecedented hostility toward the president, there had been intense discussion among the senior staff about how we should handle the dinner. However, no one but the president could make the decision. When I asked him about it, President Trump said, “I really don’t see any reason to go.”
President Trump saw it the same way I did. To attend that dinner would be to submit to an evening-long public immolation, not really Trump’s style. The president realized—correctly—that the evening was a chance for the liberal, elite media and their Hollywood friends to bash Republicans. So, I informed Jeff Mason—a reporter for Reuters and then the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association
—that the president would not be attending.
I told him I knew he wasn’t going to like our decision. Then I explained that in recent years the event often went beyond ribbing to become downright mean, and we didn’t see any reason to attend.
“Can you think it over?” Jeff asked. “Talk to the president?”
I promised I would give it a second attempt, but I knew the president was firm on this point. He saw no benefit in spending a night pretending everything was okay with a press that was at war with him. When I checked back with the president, he reaffirmed he was not going to attend and added that he didn’t see any reason for the vice president or senior staff to go. I asked them, and they agreed—they stood with the president.
This was further bad news for Jeff Mason and the White House Correspondents’ Association Board. I must admit that on a personal level, I was a little disappointed. I knew the president’s decision was the right one, but this was my chance to sit at the head table. Small and petty, yes, but as a press secretary in Washington I had always looked at that table with fondness and admiration. However, I and all the other White House staffers knew that if we laughed at a harsh joke, the press would assume we were making fun of our boss; if we sat silent, they would accuse us of being humorless and unable to take a joke. I also felt bad for Jeff. He had waited a long time to become the group’s president and had put a lot of time and effort into organizing the dinner where he would get to serve as master of ceremonies with the president of the United States at the head table. While not attending was the right call, I knew it was a major let down for him professionally.
So, we skipped the dinner, a culmination of a five-day Woodstock of the elites (with brunches, lunches, and cocktail parties) that raises some money for journalism scholarships. True to form, some in the media started to buy into the notion that by not going to a dinner, we were somehow assaulting the First Amendment. But attending a dinner of celebrities and advertisers is hardly the bellwether test of support for the First Amendment. There was no reason to validate the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner when it had degenerated into an excuse for big media and Hollywood elites to bash Republicans.
With opposition from the media and much of the bureaucracy, Republicans fight against the odds in Washington. To succeed, it is essential to have a coherent message and strategy. Too often, we didn’t.
This lack of strategic thinking became apparent at an early meeting to discuss the Republican answer to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. I turned to Tom Price, then the secretary of Health and Human Services, and asked, “Who’s with us on this? What outside groups?”
Secretary Price looked at me, a little surprised.
The secretary couldn’t name a single ally.
I was so stunned that I asked the question again. No one? Secretary Price confessed that we had no alliance of political action groups, K Street allies, corporate groups, doctors, or trade associations to back our efforts.
“How are we ever going to be successful without having a comprehensive plan and allies?” I reminded him that Obama had lined up the big healthcare trade associations to support Obamacare. “That’s how Washington works.”
And in this instance, Washington didn’t work. The failure of the administration and Republicans in Congress to replace Obamacare almost doomed the party, causing bitterness that would not fade until the success of tax reform later in the year and the clear revival of the economy.
Then there was the challenge of managing the message whenever the president himself set a new and often unexpected agenda for the day’s news with a morning Twitter feed.
While Twitter, or some future platform like it, will certainly continue to be used by future presidents, I don’t think you’re going to see another politician rely upon it the way President Trump does. The president sees Twitter as a way for him to speak directly to the American people. The media has no choice but to report his tweets verbatim.
But there is often a cost attached to the president’s early morning and late evening tweets.
In the warm afterglow of the president’s address to a joint session of Congress, I left the White House thinking, “We’re back. This is what a successful White House feels like.”
But as Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker of the Washington Post pointed out, our plan to capitalize on the tailwinds of the president’s speech by promoting new policy initiatives was sidelined by presidential tweets. The president was furious at harsh criticisms he was receiving from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who he thought were trying to curry favor with their MSNBC bosses and liberal media peers. He was dismayed by the fact that in person they had one persona and on-air quite another. He attacked “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and “Psycho Joe” and criticized Mika Brzezinski’s purported plastic surgery.9
In the face of these outbursts, the media often expected me to be an ombudsman if not an outright apologist for Donald Trump’s tweets. I never did that. And I consider my stance on this to have been a matter of principle. The job of the press secretary is to communicate the thoughts and views of the president when he or she is unable to do so. It is not to interpret the president’s thoughts and words. It is not to massage or tweak them. Sure, I made suggestions and gave my advice and counsel all the time, but in the end my job—and that of any spokesperson—was to accurately reflect the person I represented.
Unfortunately, that tweet gave every critic who had reluctantly praised the president’s speech permission to return to form. Double-edged sword is an apt cliché for Donald Trump and Twitter. Sometimes he’s cutting up the opposition and sometimes he’s cutting up his own best messages.
The media insisted that the White House press and communications shop was more than a messenger for the president—we were a story. It was hard to find talented people who could, or wanted to, endure that spotlight. In my search for a communications director, I reached out to several people, including Brian Jones, who had worked on the Romney campaign. Brian’s business was going well. He knew a White House job meant precious time away from his family, and he declined. He recommended one of his partners, Mike Dubke. I didn’t know Mike well, but I was aware that he was regarded as a talented strategist and experienced campaign adviser.
I brought Mike into the West Wing to meet some of the senior staff and then to the Oval Office to meet the president. By chance, the president had just decided to hold a press conference within a few hours. Mike’s interview soon turned into a press conference preparation session. But the two seemed to hit it off, and we offered Mike the job of communications director.
No sooner had we announced Mike’s new role than he got caught in the Washington spin cycle. He had ownership in a media-buying company, Crossroads Media, which served American Crossroads, a super PAC affiliated with Karl Rove. Within days, the media had conflated these facts and were characterizing Mike as an acolyte of Karl Rove, the mastermind of the George W. Bush administration, whom many Trump supporters had issues with.
In fact, Mike only recalled briefly meeting Karl in passing at a baseball game.
Mike was a consummate professional, not a showboat. He was exactly what we needed—someone who checked his ego at the door, managed staff well, and could provide effective, long-range planning and coordination. And yet he became a story, especially in the alt-right blogosphere where it was reported that Trump had turned to Karl Rove’s right-hand man for help. I found myself facing backlash from Reince and others about whether we had made the right decision. The attacks were especially intense from Breitbart, though Steve Bannon denied any involvement.
Within a few months, Mike Dubke resigned because the Office of Government Ethics required him to get rid off all the small business interests he had spent twenty-five years building up, making me, again, the acting communications director as well as press secretary.
As press secretary and (often) communications director, I had to work within a White House that was not exactly organized for message disciplin
e. It was hard to keep everyone from freelancing because the senior staff was structured to operate as a warren of fiefdoms rather than one cohesive unit.
Within the White House, Steve Bannon had his own PR machine, which was run by Alexandra Preate and backed by Bannon’s Brietbart News empire outside the White House. Jared had his own press person, and Kellyanne, of course, was an official surrogate but not technically a part of the communications operation. And finally, we had the ultimate press secretary—the president himself—who was often on the phone with journalists. His openness and candor was frequently rewarded with even more negative stories.
I was ultimately held accountable for messages coming out of the White House. I knew we couldn’t have everyone devising their own media strategies, but, to an unfortunate degree, we did. I had run the communications of many organizations and could predict the results of having everyone talking from a different page—not exactly a recipe for an effective press operation, or an effective White House.
And yet, here we were.
In the spirit of St. Francis’s famous serenity prayer, I had come to terms with the things I could not change in order to focus on the things I could. And if the efforts of others went wrong, it became easier for me to be at peace and say, “Well, I had nothing to do with that.”
One more point about my former colleagues—there’s an old saying that I use to describe relationships: “Friends vs. Roommates.” You can work with colleagues, hang out with them, and regard them as friends while never wanting them as roommates. But working in the White House is different. Due to the nature of our jobs, we often spent eighteen hours a day together, six days a week. We were all roommates whether we liked it or not.
Meanwhile, the president remained concerned—that’s a mild word for it—about the continuing information leaks, not just about his calls with foreign leaders, but also lower-level invasions of his privacy, like verbatim accounts of things he had said at dinners with friends.