Remembering Sarah Sanders

Sarah Sanders has been probably the most dishonest White House press secretary in history. Which, when you’re serving the most dishonest president in history, is what the job requires. But what made her so valuable to Trump was the enthusiasm with which she embraced a task that, to anyone with any principles, should have been a horror.

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There isn’t nearly enough time to document the entire mountain of falsehoods Sanders served up even before she stopped doing press briefings altogether three months ago.

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Beyond the specific lies [she told], the character of Sanders’ interactions with journalists was unusually destructive. She treated the media with open contempt — not just as individual people, but the entire enterprise in which they are engaged. She insulted them, demeaned them, and generally acted as though they were nothing but irritants who had no right to raise questions that might undermine anyone’s worship of the glorious perfection that is Donald Trump.

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Let’s recall the brief and disastrous tenure of her predecessor, Sean Spicer. What made Spicer’s time as White House press secretary so cringeworthy was a mutual awareness among him, the reporters asking him questions, and the public watching at home: He was lying, we knew he was lying, and he knew that we knew he was lying. And because he knew that we knew he was lying, he was embarrassed. He sweated, he stuttered, he shouted, he seemed always to be teetering on the brink of a breakdown. His shame was evident for all to see.

I’m not saying Spicer is some kind of admirable figure. He chose to work for Trump and chose to repeat Trump’s lies, two sins that should never be forgiven. But he was so terrible at it precisely because, somewhere inside him, there pulsed a weakened but living shred of a conscience, trying with its last remaining energy to force its way to the surface.

Sarah Sanders was not so burdened. She showed no conscience and no shame. She was smooth and calm and collected as she served up poisonous lies and infinite bad faith to the public. She was exactly what Trump wanted and all he could ever have asked for.

 WaPo