The White House has taken a stand against an American institution: the Super Bowl champ
“What color is the sky in the president’s world?” I asked this at the end of a particularly divisive press briefing by Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this week. There’s no place left to go at the White House. Reality has left the station. Credibility from the White House and the press office is nonexistent. The “Theatre of the Absurd” administration, executive produced by President Donald Trump like his old reality show, has entered a new realm of disconnect heretofore unseen in the American Republic.
The ringleader is our Commander of Cheese, as Kellyanne Conway might have mistakenly said on CNN Tuesday morning. This week, our Commander of Cheese stated he can pardon himself for crimes—crimes, he says, he didn’t commit. He isn’t above the law because the law says he is above the law. Football teams are disinvited to events they don’t wish to attend. Lies are “mistakes” and whomever disagrees with Trump is the latest piñata to be prodded.
Thus my question at the end of the briefing was on a day where we in the press corps spent more time through the looking glass than Alice and more time hunting for honesty than Diogenes. Monday began with Sarah Sanders again dodging my question about getting the president to have a solo news conference. Two years ago, he tweeted how Hillary Clinton hadn’t had one in seven months, but Trump hasn’t had a solo news conference in more than a year. He has never stepped foot in his own briefing room. Jake Tapper from CNN also asked about the president conducting a news conference on his Twitter feed, but several reporters I know at the White House were less sanguine. “Maybe we should give up asking this question. He’s never going to show up,” I was told by more than one colleague.
I’m stubborn. So on Monday I asked, “Is there any chance we could ever see the president come out here and take some questions from us in this briefing room?” Sanders dodged the question as she said, “Certainly you guys would be the first to know if the president comes out here.” Not only did that not answer my question, that was a misleading answer as well. I’m sure before reporters knew he was coming out to see us, at least the Secret Service would know—even if he decided to pop a “surprise inspection,” as I’ve suggested he should. After all, if he can do five minutes on the South Lawn or 10 minutes in the Diplomatic Room, why can’t he show up in the press room?
I followed with, “Has anybody ever in this administration asked him to back away from Twitter just for a day?” Here was the moment of clarity, at least for me. Sanders said, “In terms of Twitter, the president uses Twitter to communicate directly to the American people. Frankly, you have the ability to choose what you want to write about, and you guys choose to write about things that the American people don’t care about…”
This may have been the most honest moment by Sanders since she became press secretary, without her knowing it. The implication of course is that the American people don’t care about the president’s tweets and it also implies the president tweets to distract, and that is without a doubt the truth. Again, he’s producing a reality show. Every day he gets up and wonders what he can do in today’s exciting episode. His disconnect from reality is complete. Or so it would seem. The daily briefing is irrelevant. Without the president to answer questions about what he’s doing, we are subjected to a surrogate who many in the press try to hold accountable as if she were the president.
It is unfair to her, and it is unfair to the American people. To be fair, the press briefing isn’t the only thing irrelevant and ridiculous at the White House. After the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles refused to show up at the White House to be congratulated by Trump, the president decided to disinvite them. “Let’s be honest, they were going to send their water boys,” one of Trump’s surrogates said on CNN Tuesday night. So Trump decided to have an American Celebration on the South Lawn of the White House instead. Trump accused the Eagles of a “political stunt” by refusing to show. Trump, who has loved the divisive anger he’s stirred up by demanding NFL players stand for the National Anthem, created his own stunt with his “disinvitation” to an event no one but a few water boys planned to attend.
The briefing on Tuesday was filled with questions about the Eagles, but to be fair, there were other important questions as well. John Roberts from Fox News started it off with a bang, referring to Attorney General Jeff Sessions as Trump’s “favorite piñata” thereby ensuring that somewhere there are a bunch of budding young capitalists about to make some money from mass producing Sessions piñatas. Several reporters asked Sanders about the statement she made last August that the president did not dictate or participate in a letter his son supposedly had written about a controversial meeting with some Russians. The New York Times reported Saturday the revelation that the president “dictated” the misleading statement about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian representative during the 2016 election.
Sanders, though she had wittingly or unwittingly passed on the information to the public, would not apologize nor address this issue. Later in the briefing, reporter April Ryan tried to pin down Sanders in the press briefing regarding the statement NFL players were making when they take a knee while the anthem plays, but Sanders would have none of it; she didn’t want to hear about police brutality and the death of young African Americans. It was about “respect” for the flag. Of course, that has never been what the protests were about, but Trump has successfully made it about forced patriotism.
Chris Cuomo, in interviewing Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director, noted that, “Unconditional love for this country is expressed in our freedom and our respect of tolerance.” But the Trump team doesn’t want to hear it. It occurs to me that it’s extremely sanctimonious and hypocritical to demand players stand for the anthem when people in the stands watching the NFL games are scratching their backsides, buying beer and popcorn and lounging in their seats, but that’s just me.
It’s hypocritical to demand players stand for the anthem when people in the stands watching the NFL games are scratching their backsides and buying beer and popcorn, but that’s just me.
To make his point, Trump held his special event on the South Lawn, but couldn’t even get reporters to the event on time. We came out of the press briefing on Tuesday while the anthem was being played. As we shuffled onto the South Lawn, more than one reporter noted the administration is so inept it couldn’t even plan an entirely staged event properly. Most of the crowd of a few hundred gathered on the South Lawn turned out to be federal employees, or RNC members and a few interns. I didn’t see any Philadelphia Eagle fans, though we were told the celebration was for them, and didn’t see any Philadelphia jerseys.
After a few minutes of praising the country and himself, Trump walked down the rope line of the crowd shaking hands for the cameras and his own pleasure I suppose. At the end of the receiving line, he ran into Jim Acosta of CNN, Hallie Jackson of NBC and me. We all began shouting questions. Acosta asked him if NFL athletes were unpatriotic. Jackson asked if he’d met with the athletes. I asked if he would meet with them. He looked at me and the other reporters with a blank stare and bolted for the West Wing. Vice President Pence then walked by. He didn’t answer questions either. Someone even asked why EPA Director Scott Pruitt would want to buy a used mattress; it got a laugh and a few bizarre looks but no answer.
Around 7 p.m. Tuesday, Raj Shah told the press corps, “Kelly Sadler is no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President.” Sadler had been dangling for a few weeks after making a bad joke about Senator John McCain’s health, so the move was anticipated and expected but nonetheless it topped off two days of increasingly bizarre behavior at the White House. How bizarre? Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, when asked about Trump possibly pardoning himself for crimes Trump claims he didn’t commit, said, “I was trying to come up with some catchy phrase that would capture, describe yet another excess of this president..I’m out of catchy phrases.”
The president, however, remains in full meltdown mode capable of twisting and bending reality to his whim whenever possible. Wednesday, in justifying tariffs against Canada, it was widely reported that Trump had a testy telephone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which Trump erroneously justified the tariff with Canada burning the White House during the War of 1812. Britain, of course, is the country responsible for burning the White House. But for the Commander of Cheese it matters little. For the rest of us, we can only sit and wonder what color the sky is in Trump’s world.