The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  There is an even more charitable view of Sean’s actions. Some in Washington believe that Spicer, along with former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, felt somewhat compelled to work with Trump to normalize him and, perhaps, even to pull him into the mainstream. This is part of the “they tried to save America” defense you hear from time to time in Washington, about establishment officials who go to work for Trump. For a brief period, Spicer and Priebus gave Trump a bit of that establishment sheen.

  Still, it can’t be forgotten that Sean was making a choice. Even though every time he came out to the podium in the White House Briefing Room he looked like he was in a hostage video—reading from a script, mindful that the boss was watching—every day, he was making a decision to be there. Still, while he often received mysterious notes from press aides in the middle of briefings, prompting him to quickly wrap up things up, he wasn’t a captive. He wasn’t chained to his desk in the press secretary’s offices, one of the most coveted corners of the nation’s capital. Yes, Sean certainly had a choice, and his choice was to enable Trump as he divided the country in ways we had never seen before.

  If Spicer thought the task of defending Trump had become impossible for him, he should have done himself and all Americans the favor of stepping down much sooner. Imagine the amount of good Sean could have done for the country had he taken a different route, such as resigning in protest and warning us of what was going on behind closed doors in the West Wing.

  Perhaps the ultimate legacy of Sean Spicer, the one that would leave the longest and most indelible mark on the administration, on the press corps, and on the public, was that he was the first face of the administration for us beyond Trump. He set the tone from the beginning about what it meant to be the spokesperson for the Trump administration. He had told the first big lie of the administration about the inauguration. The transparent stonewalling, the twisting of facts, the demonization of the press—all these dangerous tactics had found oxygen in Spicer’s approach in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. Years from now, he might be remembered more as a punch line than anything else. However, through his refusal to correct the lies and his allegiance to the man in the higher office over the higher good, he came to embody the character traits we’d see time and time again from those in this White House.

  Most concerning of all, though, was how Spicer’s tenure showed the need for absolute vigilance from the press corps. Repeatedly, our will to push back, to challenge the destruction of long-held norms, was being tested. While the debates over restricted camera coverage and freezing out networks might sound petty, they were early skirmishes in a larger conflict. There were stories brewing that would demand answers to hard questions, and it was increasingly unclear if the American people were going to get those answers.

  The passage of time might soften my feelings here, but it’s not fair to let Sean off the hook, is it? When it came to what sometimes felt like Trump’s bonfire of the insanities, Sean was always there to light the match, toss on another log, and pour on the gasoline. Our battles in the Briefing Room left me with one simple lesson that should be taught in our schools and colleges to rising journalists and public servants: as a spokesman for the president of the United States, you serve the people of the United States, not the president. Sean lost sight of that crucial responsibility; he was derelict in his duty. He and the rest of Trumpworld stamped all of us in the press as traitors simply for trying to call out the administration on its brutal, unrelenting dishonesty. But in Trump’s war against “the enemy of the people,” Sean’s departure didn’t signal an end to the hostility to the facts. Spicer’s replacement was more than willing to enter the battlefield. For Sarah Huckabee Sanders, her moment of untruth had arrived.

  6

  The Worst Wing

  You’d think that after the reign of Sean Spicer—which introduced the American people to embarrassing claims (inauguration crowd size) and amateurish handling of sober topics (“Holocaust centers”)—that Trump would have been ready to hire a professional for the job of press secretary. But we didn’t end up with something out of the hit NBC show The West Wing. Trump had decided to elevate Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had impressed senior White House staffers, most notably the president himself. By and large, Sanders simply picked up where Spicer had left off. There was no honeymoon with the press.

  Sanders, who, we were told, preferred to be called “Sarah Sanders,” continued the Trump administration tradition of walking into the Briefing Room and often misleading the press. She has been caught on multiple occasions telling whoppers, often explaining this away as trying to “give the best information that I have.” She, too, retaliated against CNN by refusing to call on us during the briefings. Instead of trying to repair the broken relationship with the press, she seemed to delight in it. She also continued the West Wing’s practice of showing preference to conservative news outlets. Rather than holding briefings with reporters, Sarah turned to Fox News on a regular basis for less confrontational interviews. Returning from the Fox News live position on the North Lawn, she would be gracious enough to take a few questions from the rest of the White House press corps, which gathered to peck for any crumbs she’d leave on her way back to her office.

  Oddly enough, Sarah was also once one of those veteran campaign operatives who generally got along with the press. We had all been out for drinks with her. She could throw back her Maker’s and Coke with the best of them. Sarah was well known to reporters from her days working for her father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who had mounted his own underdog presidential bid but lost in 2008 to John McCain. Huckabee once again flirted with a presidential run in 2012, but held back to make money over at Fox News. Perhaps the preference for Fox News, which for all intents and purposes, had become a state TV outlet for the White House, was in the blood.

  Another veteran from the Huckabee presidential campaign days, South Carolina GOP operative Hogan Gidley, later went to work in the West Wing as Sarah’s deputy. Hogan was also someone you could have a drink with. We got along pretty well when he worked for Rick Santorum’s campaign in 2012. The Santorum people, including the candidate himself, thanked CNN for devoting much more coverage to their campaign than they were receiving from the other networks, which had assigned all their top correspondents to covering Mitt Romney. I had advocated for this approach behind the scenes, and my bosses agreed. You’d think that some of this would have accumulated some goodwill with Sarah and Hogan down the road. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

  Still, as Sarah came on board as Spicer’s deputy, she was the press official who often came across as the less volatile voice of reason behind the scenes. Spicer would explode at us, and Sarah would tell folks how Sean was under a lot of pressure to smooth things over. She could also be candid in less formal settings. En route to Saudi Arabia during that first foreign trip, she told a bunch of reporters that she was hurt by Saturday Night Live’s depiction of her by an overweight comedian on the show. SNL’s first sketch about her described her as being the daughter of a “Southern hamburger.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Sarah complained, before downing a couple more drinks and sleeping for the rest of the flight. I remember feeling bad for her at the time.

  Publicly, though, she was sending all the right signals to Trump that she was capable of misleading the press. A key case in point: On July 11, 2017, not long before Spicer resigned, publication of some of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails revealed that in June 2016, he, along with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, had met at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney with ties to the Kremlin who was offering negative information about Hillary Clinton. But Trump and his team had engaged in a deception about that meeting, telling the New York Times in a statement that the meeting was actually about Russian adoptions, not the Clinton campaign. As we would later discover, Trump had dictated that misleading statement. This was another
episode in the Russia investigation story that raised serious questions. Was a cover-up orchestrated to conceal the campaign’s connections to a foreign adversary? It seems only natural to ask the question. If we hadn’t pressed for answers, my goodness, we would be failing the American people.

  But that’s not what the public was initially told. After the emails became public, we were all pushing hard for the White House to provide some answers. In August 2017, Sarah insisted to the press that Trump had not dictated the statement when, in fact, he had. “He certainly didn’t dictate [the statement], but he—like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion [sic] like any father would do,” she falsely claimed.

  No matter what Special Counsel Robert Mueller would later conclude in his investigation, this was a clear example of the White House misleading the public, a part of a pattern of behavior that only fueled more interest in the Russia story. Getting caught in these misstatements, whether the falsehoods were intentional or not, just made things more complicated for the Trump team.

  A memorable case in point for me came in December 2017, when she told me if I tried to ask a question of the president during a press availability (or “pool spray,” as we call it), I might not be allowed into another such event. Now, keep in mind, a pool spray is not the same as a briefing or news conference. It involves fairly standard stuff: when the president signs a bill or executive order or meets with a foreign leader, at the conclusion of his remarks, members of the press have a chance to ask a question. The thinking behind pool sprays, which have been going on for decades during Republican and Democratic administrations, is that the president gets to spread his message at that particular moment and the press has an opportunity to ask off-the-cuff questions about the news of the day.

  However, like so much in the Trump era, even these seemingly innocuous events had taken on far greater meaning. Much of this came from Trump himself, who often sets such a negative news agenda for himself that invariably the news of the day was, in part, spent dealing with his messaging from his early morning tweets. His tweets, usually composed and posted while he watched Fox and Friends, were often incendiary, offensive, and many times false. On this particular day, Trump had insulted New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a potential 2020 rival.

  Here is Trump’s tweet from the day Sarah threatened me, December 12, 2017:

  @realDonaldTrump

  Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!

  8:03 AM-12 Dec 2017

  As soon as he posted the tweet, the news cycle, as it often does, went bananas. Clearly, by saying Gillibrand would “do anything” for a campaign contribution, Trump was suggesting that the New York senator was somehow prostituting herself as a politician. Short of the most ardent Trump supporter, anyone could see that the president was obviously leveling a disgusting, sexist charge.

  Later in the day, Trump was scheduled to sign a defense spending bill. And lo and behold, it was CNN’s day to be in the White House TV pool.

  Now, I would not have been doing my job as a member of the White House press corps, nor would I have been doing my job for the press pool, if I had not asked a question about his offensive tweet. Sanders knew exactly what I was about to do.

  She walked right up to me. “Hey, can we talk?” she said.

  “Sure,” I responded.

  Sarah explained that Trump was not in the mood to take questions. He was already pissed off that I had tried to ask questions at a previous pool spray.

  Too bad, I countered. That’s what we do.

  Sarah then warned me that if I tried to ask a question, I might not be allowed into another photo opportunity. It was clearly a threat.

  A few moments later, Trump entered the room. I emailed CNN president Jeff Zucker to let him know what had happened. His reply: don’t be bullied. (In case you’re wondering, Jeff, to his credit, has never tried to control what I do as a reporter. I can’t say this about a lot of TV executives. That day, Jeff was simply trying to let me know that he had my back. Standing up to these guys, as he knows, isn’t easy.)

  So, I asked the question: “Mr. President, what did you mean when you said that Kirsten Gillibrand would do anything for a campaign contribution?”

  Trump didn’t respond, and that’s okay; that’s his prerogative. I could see he was furious. But the question had to be asked. The president’s defenders can attack the press for shouting questions or being “rude,” as Trump likes to say. But he doesn’t get to fire off an inflammatory tweet or make an outrageous statement without some expectation of intense press coverage. Trump’s tweet had continued to dominate the news cycle, and my question to him, in my view, indicated that there was still some semblance of accountability left in Washington.

  If a penalty flag needs to be thrown in that pool spray, it should be for Sarah, not me. For starters, she shouldn’t have threatened me. More importantly, it’s not up to Sanders to decide which journalists represent the press pool at the “sprays.” That’s up to the news outlets that cover these events. Clearly, I thought, she was testing those boundaries.

  Like Spicer, she wanted to let it be known that she believed her job was to protect the president. What she has never understood, though, is that the job of the press secretary is more than that. The job also includes working with the media. Yes, you have to make sure the president’s message is delivered to the American people, but at its essence, the position requires a healthy respect for the mission of a free press. Reporters are a noisy, dysfunctional bunch of people. They are demanding and pretty distrustful of government. Yes, we respect the office of the presidency. Of course! That’s why we believe it warrants so much scrutiny. At the end of the day, reporters simply want to write or broadcast a story that tells the American people what’s going on in the White House, the United States, and the wider world. That’s pretty much it. As soon as a press secretary understands that, the job should go much more smoothly. In my observation, it’s a pretty straightforward position. Journalists have questions. Answer them. Reporters have deadlines. Help them meet them. Don’t threaten us. And above all else, and as much as humanly possible, tell us the truth.

  Like Spicer, Sanders never really understood any of this, so perhaps it’s not surprising that my relationship with her continued to deteriorate. She once asked me via email if I had been “day drinking again.” My response to her was “No, have you?”

  * * *

  SANDERS DID TRY TO RETURN TO THE REGULAR ORDER OF THINGS during the on-camera briefings, which had been restored by Scaramucci, the single greatest accomplishment of his abbreviated tenure.

  One of the other changes that came about after Sarah took over from Sean was that she would occasionally invite guests, senior officials from the administration, to chat with reporters about initiatives under way in the Trump White House. This quickly became one of the ways the White House tried to control the message at the briefings. These “mystery guests,” as we called them, were often unannounced and gave the White House the ability to spend more time talking about a specific issue and less time taking our questions. Now, it’s true that we had these sorts of briefings under Obama; and Sean brought in guests, too. But Sarah, as she was just getting started, did it more frequently.

  The reporters would be gathered in the Briefing Room, anticipating that the press secretary would come out alone to take our questions. Then, instead, surprise! Out would come a Cabinet member or some other senior administration official to talk about a particular subject. Perhaps it would be the treasury secretary to talk about new sanctions on North Korea. On one notable occasion, it was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, to talk about the president’s push to deregulate the very industries that polluted the environment.

  Pruitt, who would later
resign under an ethical cloud—he lived at a lobbyist’s condo and once declared his desire to buy a mattress from the Trump Hotel in DC—and not for his hard-right environmental positions, clashed with reporters (including yours truly) over climate change during a briefing back in June 2017. I asked whether his head was “in the sand” on the issue.

  “You know, people have called me a climate skeptic or a climate denier. I don’t even know what it means to deny the climate. I would say that there are climate exaggerators,” the EPA head told reporters at the briefing—incredibly, given that he’s widely recognized as a climate change denier. This was the kind of language used by energy industry lobbyists, not Cabinet secretaries working for a guy who had promised to “drain the swamp.” Does gaslighting contribute to global warming? I digress.

  A few weeks later, on June 28, 2017, we heard from the head of the border patrol, Thomas Homan, who fumbled to find an answer when I pressed him on whether undocumented immigrants committed more crimes than native-born Americans. Studies have shown that they don’t. Homan tried to bolster his argument by noting that the undocumented commit crimes by crossing the border illegally. That’s a misleading talking point.

  “Aren’t you concerned, though, about exacerbating fears about undocumented immigrants?” I asked. “You’re making it sound as if undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than people who are just native-born Americans. . . . What is your sense of the numbers on this? Are undocumented people more likely or less likely to commit crimes?” I continued.

  “Did I say aliens commit more crimes than U.S. citizens? I didn’t say that,” he replied. Homan, a holdover from the Obama administration, had clearly found himself right at home working for Trump. A senior administration official once described Homan to me as a “true believer” when it came to the hard-right positions of the anti-immigration think tanks in DC.