by Jim Acosta
Spicer was obviously angry because somebody from inside Trumpworld had leaked the news. Think about how that looked. The man in the White House in control of rolling out stories hadn’t been able to manage the news about the position in charge of rolling out stories.
There I was, standing next to my young son, who had come into the room, listening to Sean screaming at the top of his lungs, “You’re a fucking weasel!”
When I hung up, I looked down at my son.
With a look of astonishment on his face, he asked, “Who was that?”
“Son,” I said, “that was the White House.”
* * *
NOT ALL SUCH EXCHANGES WITH SPICER HAPPENED IN PRIVATE. IT should not be forgotten how Spicer treated some of my colleagues in the Briefing Room. His appalling treatment of April Ryan, perhaps the most visible African American reporter at the White House, was awful. During one briefing, on March 28, he chastised her simply for shaking her head, which only made him look chauvinistic and petty. April, as tough a reporter as she is, had asked a pretty benign question that day, pressing Spicer on whether he had become concerned about the image of the White House. Sean tried to dodge the question, leading April to shake her head in disbelief. As reporters, we often shoot glances of disbelief at the press secretary, especially when that press secretary is named Sean Spicer. If you can’t handle reporters shaking their heads at you, you shouldn’t be at that podium. It’s that simple.
As we filed out of the Briefing Room, I remember April, who is a friend of mine, asking me, “Can you believe that?”
“Unbelievable,” I replied, an exchange April and I had on too many occasions heading back to our workspace in the White House basement.
One thing that April and I had in common was that Sean was making things personal with both of us. To April, I became her “brother from another mother”; April was my “sister from another mister.” She and I had something else in common: we were both beginning to receive death threats, and at levels we had not experienced before. April would later confide that she had the FBI on “speed dial.”
Ryan, like so many other veterans of the press corps, has covered the White House going back decades. She deserves more respect than that. Spicer’s treatment of her pretty much summed up the White House attitude toward reporters in general. Certainly, it wasn’t the way he used to treat us, but once you are drawn into Trump’s orbit, it seemed, the press was the “opposition party” and, sadly, the “enemy.”
Occasionally, I thought Spicer and I would turn a corner, but then, almost like clockwork, he would dash those hopes. One day, I was sitting in a booth in the press area of the West Wing when an aide stopped by to ask me to come up to Sean’s office. No problem. Was Spicer calling me into his office to yell at me? To make peace? Perhaps we would finally bury the hatchet. I dropped everything and made my way to his office.
As it turned out, Sean had sent for me to complain about a chyron (a graphic summarizing the news of the day at the bottom of the screen) that was on air at that moment during a segment of Erin Burnett’s Out Front. I can’t remember what the chyron said. Whatever it was, I don’t recall it being that bad. These things can always be toned down, I guess. But it had set Spicer off.
As I walked into his office, he was screaming obscenities into the phone. On the other end of the line was CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist.
“Hold on,” Spicer says, as he stopped yelling at Feist and turned to me and barked, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” Look at the chyron, he demanded, pointing at the TV in his office.
This was classic Spicer. He was so upset about the chyron CNN was running that, in a perverse circle of life, he was screaming at my bureau chief over the phone and at me in person at the same time. As ridiculous as this scene was, and after all the drama Sean and I had been through together, I still tried to help. I emailed the show about the chyron to see if they could tweak it, but it was too late. The segment was over. By that point, Spicer had finished his ranting, so I left.
There were moments of relative peace between Spicer and me. I’m happy to report that we did get along at the 2017 Easter Egg Roll. You know the event. Thousands of children and their families gather on the South Lawn to take part in one of the oldest White House traditions. The Easter Bunny is there. There are tables where children color Easter eggs. The First Lady sits and reads stories to the kids. And, as you may have seen, adorable little boys and girls, dressed in their Sunday best, gather to roll an Easter egg with a wooden spoon across the South Lawn grass. I reached out to Spicer to see if he wanted to do an interview. He must have been in a good mood that day, because he agreed. In the days leading up to that Easter Egg Roll, Spicer had been the target of ridicule over his past service as the White House Easter Bunny. There were photos of him in a bunny costume circulating on the internet, attached to some rather vicious, mocking stories.
This was one of those moments when I really felt sorry for Sean. Yes, he could be difficult and even downright nasty. At times, it seemed he had it coming. But making fun of a guy for playing the Easter Bunny? It just felt ugly to me, the kind of bullying that has begun to fill our public discourse, especially when figures like Sean are on the ropes. If it’s wrong to bully people on social media, isn’t it also wrong to ridicule the press secretary, even if it’s Sean?
When I interviewed Sean that day, I didn’t bring up the Easter Bunny gig. That would have been, in my view, just petty. I did ask him about North Korea and tried to cover other policy areas. But at the end of the interview, I decided to ask him about Melissa McCarthy, the comedian who had helped make Spicer a household name. Yes, her portrayal of Sean on SNL was brutal, but Spicer hadn’t been the first political figure to be lampooned on Saturday Night Live. So, I thought, his insights on McCarthy’s version of “Spicy” might be illuminating. Would he laugh it off? Would he throw a jab at McCarthy? Would he rage at me for asking the question? His answer might tell us a bit about how he was handling it all.
Instead, Sean gave a rather bland answer on the topic. “I’m usually fast asleep by the time that comes on,” he said with a smile, but dryly. “I’m in bed, get up, go to church the next day, and look ahead,” he added.
“I get made fun of, too,” I said, trying to keep the conversation going.
“Well, maybe more deserved,” he responded, with a grin.
This was about as boring as Sean could have been on the topic. And maybe that’s how he wanted it. If he had gotten animated on the subject, it would have made news. The moment was perhaps the last genuinely civil exchange I’ve had with Sean.
It was not, however, the last time I felt sorry for him. In May 2017, after the firing of James Comey, Trump was ready to get out of Dodge. As previously scheduled, we all embarked on the president’s first foreign trip, traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy, and Brussels. In Saudi Arabia, Trump famously visited a Saudi facility purported to be a center for combating terrorism without a hint of awareness that most of the 9/11 hijackers had been from Saudi Arabia.
The president finished off the stop by placing his hands on some kind of strange glowing orb. Ever the showman, he was eating it all up. But the images sent out to the rest of the world were jaw-dropping. It was nothing less than a coup for Riyadh to have the president of the United States turn to the Saudis for their expertise in the fight against terrorism, this in a country that had been the source of so much violent extremism around the world. The administration appeared to be dodging any kind of on-camera accountability along the way. Top officials, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, spoke with reporters, but did so anonymously, on background, so they wouldn’t have their names attached to whatever quotes they served up to the media. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held a news conference, but for foreign press outlets only.
Still, the biggest absurdity of this first leg of the foreign trip was undoubtedly when Trump and his commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, joined the Saudis in a ceremonial sword dan
ce. I remember being in the press filing center seeing the video feed of Trump, Ross, and the Saudis all doing the cha-cha and wielding Lawrence of Arabia–type swords. The other reporters and I burst into laughter. Perhaps we were delirious from the jet lag, but we all scrambled up to the monitors to snap a photo of the images being fed in by the White House pool. Looking back, though, I see that the scene wasn’t really funny. It was another example that, on the world stage, Trump seemed to prefer to have autocrats and dictators as his dancing partners. As we would all come to learn later on in the administration, with the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its aftermath, U.S. coziness with the kingdom in Riyadh has real-world consequences. In hindsight, I wish we hadn’t laughed at the sword dancing. Yes, it was long before Khashoggi’s violent death, but it makes me sick just thinking about it.
In addition to the critical foreign policy issues we were following on that trip, we were keeping tabs on a different sideshow: the fate of the press secretary. We were on Spicy-watch. There had long been questions looming over Sean, many of them fueled by Spicer’s enemies in Trumpworld—he had many—who wanted to see him fired. Was Trump going to fire him? If the president fired Spicer, would Priebus go, too? Priebus and Spicer were always seen as a package deal. “The RNC crowd” is how Trump campaign veterans described them, both inside and outside the White House. Spicer, in their eyes, would never be seen as an “original” from the campaign. After disparaging Trump privately to anybody who would listen during the primaries, Sean had glommed on at the end of the election cycle and snatched up one of the top jobs in all of American politics. That generated a mountain of animosity inside Trumpworld and made him a lot of enemies. Mostly, though, he was despised because he had beaten them to the job.
For his part, Priebus is almost too nice a guy to be part of any story about Trump. He and I would frequently chat it up at the various media dinners around Washington. Still, he had his detractors. In many ways, his approachable, affable nature probably made him ill-suited to be Trump’s chief of staff. Reince very much had an open-door policy during his tenure. Just about any Trump associate or friend could call the president on Reince’s personal phone or make an appointment to visit the Oval Office. This was part of Reince’s undoing.
Priebus seemed to compensate for his weak standing in the White House by resorting to the same sycophancy that Trump craved from his top aides. Case in point was the infamous Cabinet meeting in June 2017, when Vice President Pence, the Trump Cabinet, and other top aides went around the table praising the president.
“We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda,” Priebus gushed.
“I wasn’t saying he was a blessing. I was saying the job was a blessing,” Priebus later told me.
But nobody could top Pence: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” We were all waiting for him to describe Trump as their “Dear Leader,” like something out of North Korea. This wasn’t The Apprentice. It was The Twilight Zone.
Undermining Priebus perhaps more than anyone was Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who had been fired by the candidate after more than a year on the job. He was constantly hanging around the White House during the first year of the administration, bending Trump’s ear and using his access to promote his “consulting” work. Lewandowski wasn’t alone. Jason Miller and Bryan Lanza, former campaign spokesmen, were other frequent visitors among the Trumpworld figures seen milling around the White House grounds. The Corey sightings inside the West Wing routinely led to speculation that he was about to replace Priebus at any moment. One outside Trump adviser told me that Corey never really wanted to work at the White House, but that the “campaign” people got a kick out of leaking Lewandowski’s White House visits to the press primarily because those visits annoyed the “RNC” people inside the White House, such as Reince and Sean. To this point, Lewandowski would occasionally walk past the cameras on the North Lawn to draw maximum attention, guaranteeing that Politico or Axios would publish another “Corey story,” as I called them. It was “catnip for the media . . . a bright shiny object,” the adviser said of the Lewandowski-Priebus stories. “Something we enjoy doing.” This is how Trumpworld played its games, making life miserable for people they didn’t like inside the White House by leaking palace intrigue stories to the press.
“The knives were out!” was how sources inside Trumpworld were constantly describing Spicer’s future. Sean was always portrayed as being on thin ice. “The boss is not happy [with Sean],” that same Trump adviser told me on a regular basis. CNN reported this kind of stuff infrequently because, after a while, we could see that people were just screwing with Reince and Sean.
Still, there were instances when it was abundantly clear that Trump’s dissatisfaction with Spicer was indeed growing. There was ample of evidence of Sean’s rapid descent during that first foreign trip. When we arrived in Rome, the news was breaking that Trump was hiring an outside counsel to represent him in the Russia investigation. Still, as massive as the Russia investigation was at that time, the development that grabbed the attention of nearly every reporter on that trip came the following day.
Trump was to meet with none other than His Holiness Pope Francis. There was plenty to dissect about the visit. The pope had not hidden the fact that he didn’t really care for Trump. His statements coming out of the Vatican, not to mention his 2015 visit with Obama on the South Lawn of the White House, where he spoke about the threat posed by climate change, made it pretty clear that he was, for the most part, a progressive pontiff. But that’s not the storyline that emerged from Trump’s stop at the Vatican.
The president brought a small entourage with him for his brief encounter with the Holy Father. To the amazement of the entire press corps and much of Washington, Spicer was left out of that entourage. Now, I had been assured by a couple of White House officials that this had nothing to do with Sean; and other reporters were talking to the same officials and hearing the same thing. But we never believed any of it for a second. Spicer was a devout Irish Catholic. He was so filled with Irish pride, in fact, that he wore shamrock pants on St. Patrick’s Day. He really did! Leaving Sean out of the mix for a meeting with the pope, of all the people on earth, sent a clear and vicious message. As I learned from other sources who advise Trump on a regular basis, the president was ready for Spicer to leave, but he didn’t want to fire him. My sources told me Trump wanted Spicer to leave on his own.
“It was a slap in the face,” a senior White House official described the snub to me.
When Spicer’s absence from the Trump entourage became known, calls and texts poured in from sources, especially those who didn’t like Sean. One particular enemy of Spicer’s called rather upset, confiding to me that even she had to feel sorry for him at that moment. Here was Spicer, at the top of his political career as the White House press secretary, being humiliated on the world stage. He was probably the most visible Catholic on the Trump team, and yet he was being denied a meeting with the pope. When would he ever have such an opportunity again, to see the leader of his Church as part of the president’s team? It’s very likely he wouldn’t.
“The president didn’t do that. Other people did that.” A senior White House official claimed Trump wasn’t behind the snub. “That was petty,” the official said. “Those people no longer work in the administration.”
This sums up the nastiness of Trumpworld. The president often didn’t pull his employee into a boardroom, as he had on reality television, and thunder, “You’re fired.” Instead, he or his people played games with Sean’s head and, in this case, his faith. It was another reminder that Trump demands loyalty from his subjects but gives almost none in return.
I remember hopping on the phone with Sean later on during that trip. He sounded as if he had a few drinks in him. He sounded sad. Why wouldn’t he? He had been all but excommunicated from Trumpworld,
and at the Vatican no less.
* * *
AS BAD AS I FELT FOR SPICER IN THAT MOMENT, THIS WAS NO TIME to let him off the hook. He was still the press secretary, and he was beginning to crack down on CNN even more. As spring turned to summer, he was starting to play games with the daily White House briefings. Breaking with years of tradition, he was freezing out certain networks and news outlets simply by refusing to call on some reporters, including me. CNN was feeling this more than any other network. For several weeks in a row between April and June, Spicer slowly but surely turned off our access. This, of course, was retaliation for our coverage of the administration.
There were two ways for us to respond to this. We could absorb this nonsense, as we had all the other abuse, or we could push back. My sense was that we had to push back. Trump had called us “the enemy of the people” and “fake news.” As he would say to his base at his campaign rallies, what the hell did we have to lose? So, I decided to start interrupting Spicer during the briefings. If he wasn’t going to call on CNN, I thought, CNN was going to call him out.
A case in point came in that tumultuous month of May 2017, after the Comey firing, when Trump suggested that he had the former FBI director over a barrel because there may have been recordings of their encounters, tapes that would prove that the president was right about everything, or so he imagined. This suggestion, which later turned out to be another one of Trump’s lies, came per usual in the form of a tweet that, per usual, was designed to disrupt the news cycle. All this, once again, tossed Sean back into the ungodly madness of explaining away Trump’s falsehoods in front of reporters.
Three days after Trump’s tweet, at the May 15 briefing, Spicer repeatedly dodged questions about whether such records existed.
“The president has made it clear what his position is,” Spicer told reporters. “I was clear the president would have nothing further on that last week,” he added.