Sean Spicer kicked off his time as White House press secretary by becoming a national laughingstock over his outrageously false claim that Donald Trump had “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.” Now that he’s no longer at the White House and is willing to make the rounds cracking jokes about that lie, Spicer is getting the celebrity treatment, with a cameo at the Emmys and jovial appearances on late-night talk shows, to say nothing of an appointment as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.
This is all gross. Sean Spicer should be a pariah. The fact that he started off as a laughingstock—awkward and uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit as he told an obvious lie to soothe his boss’s vanity—does not mean that all of Spicer’s lies were trivial or funny. Shoot, it doesn’t mean that the inauguration lie itself was trivial. The fact that Spicer wasn’t a completely fluid and confident liar does not minimize his lies. He knew what he was doing and he did it anyway because he was fundamentally on board with Donald Trump’s divisive, bigoted agenda and the crusade to take health coverage from tens of millions of Americans. And now everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to Stephen Colbert to Harvard University is offering him the chance to pass it off as a joke and explain why he was right to make lying his profession.
(Spicer glides out with a podium, Melissa McCarthy-style.)
SPICER: This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period — both in person and around the world.
HA HA HA HA HA! See, he’s sending up his earlier lie so all is forgiven, right? And it wasn’t his fault, because as he told Kimmel, “Look, your job as press secretary is to represent the president's voice.” Even when the president wants you to lie—a position that seems to have surprised some other former press secretaries, Republicans included.
But Spicer’s jokes about the inauguration crowd lie are being used to cover over a lot of other, more harmful lies. Ryan Lizza wrote in July that:
Spicer defended Trump’s lie about how there were three million fraudulent votes in the 2016 election. He spent weeks using shifting stories to defend Trump’s lie about President Barack Obama wiretapping Trump Tower. In trying to explain the urgency of the attack on Syria, Spicer explained, “You had someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
Last week, he lied about the nature of the meeting at Trump Tower in June, 2016, between senior Trump-campaign officials and several people claiming to have information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. “There was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for discussion about adoption,” Spicer claimed, bizarrely, because Donald Trump, Jr., had already admitted that the meeting was about Russian dirt on Clinton.
Trump’s effort to suppress voting by Democratic-leaning groups is very serious, and Spicer took a key role in pushing the faked-up rationale for that anti-voting crusade. Russia, Syria … Spicer may not have been able to control the message coming from Donald Trump, but he could have walked away and he didn’t. (At least not until Anthony Scaramucci was hired—and what does it say that that, and not any of what came before, was the breaking point for him?)
There’s been plenty of criticism of all the offers Spicer is getting, but in the end, he’s still getting them, and he’s going to profit:
The MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell commented that the Emmys "helped Spicer pump up his 'lecture' fees, which is all that matters to him now."
And it’s one more horrifying lesson in how our grand American meritocracy works: