In a direct contradiction to what other members of his administration have been saying, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Donald Trump’s tweets are, in fact, direct presidential statements. This creates a world of problems for Donald Trump, and proves that his staff has no idea what’s going on. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript begins below video:
Ladies and gentlemen, it is official. According to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, everything that Donald Trump says on Twitter is an official presidential statement. Sean Spicer said that during Tuesday’s White House press briefing. Everything Trump says on Twitter, it’s an official presidential statement.
Now, here’s the problem: I guess Sean Spicer hadn’t been talking with or even paying attention to what the other members of the Trump administration had been saying in the media, because earlier this week, Kellyanne Conway said, “No, this is just Donald Trump just talking. These aren’t presidential statements, it’s just Twitter, right? He’s just talking to some people.” Sean Spicer threw all of that out the window by callously admitting that, yep, those are presidential statements. Next question, please.
Sean, look, you hate your job. We get it, we understand that, everybody knows it, man. But you at least have to read off the same script as the rest of the administration. Now, Spicer’s comment is dangerous for several reasons. Obviously one, Donald Trump goes on Twitter, he says things that are not true, most of his base believes them, so now they’re running around with this false information that Obama wiretapped Donald Trump, or that Germans today are bad, bad people, as Donald Trump has said on Twitter, or that there was some kind of mythical attack one night that didn’t happen, because Donald Trump was watching a documentary on Fox News.
His tweets are dangerous, they have real world repercussions, and they provide a dangerous disservice to the American public by dumbing them all down. But according to you, those are official presidential statements, and so people will treat them as such. The second reason this is so dangerous is because it shows how disconnected this White House staff is from even one another. I’m not saying I want everybody to go out there and repeat the same lie, but if I’m in Donald Trump’s position, and I have members of my staff saying one thing today, a different thing tomorrow, maybe somewhere in between the next day, that’s not good.
That means your staff is not working together, it means there is no cohesion, there’s no cohesion, there’s no cohesive message, and everybody’s out there contradicting one another. It makes you look bad, and it shows the public that your administration is completely dysfunctional. So yeah, it’s funny that Sean Spicer came out and said this. It proves what we all knew, but it is actually symptomatic of much bigger problems within the Trump administration, showing that they have no idea what’s going on, they don’t talk to one another, and none of them are operating on the same page. For a guy like Donald Trump, who has a very short temper and doesn’t tolerate non-cohesiveness very well, this isn’t going to end well for anyone within that administration.
