Always deflect

I remain fascinated by Sarah Sanders’s intransigence. There is something morbidly fascinating, at least to me, in that kind of determination to continue being evil and never relent.

After admitting to investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that she delivered a false statement from the White House podium, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, defended herself in Trumpian fashion on Friday morning. She counterattacked.

It’s like Morgane Oger, blaming Meghan Murphy and other feminists for the predatory acts of Jonathan Yaniv. “I’m not the shameless liar, you’re the shameless liar!”

Asked on “Good Morning America” if the report had damaged her credibility, Ms. Sanders responded that she had made the statement in the heat of the moment, and that it was not “a scripted talking point.”

But then she added, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a robot like the Democrat Party that went out for two and a half years and repeated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign.”

“The Democrat Party” – as nobody calls it except the rudest Republicans.

It has been a hallmark of the Trump White House never to admit a mistake, never to apologize and never to cede a point.

There are few things more intolerable in human relations than that. It’s so domineering, and so progress-killing.

More often, Ms. Sanders speaks for the president on friendly programs like “Fox & Friends.” She has also come to view her role as a person who defends her colleagues and the president, rather than someone who delivers a message to the press about the work that is underway at the White House.

In other words she doesn’t do her job, she does a different job that isn’t her job and shouldn’t be an executive branch job at all. If presidents want public relations operatives they can pay for them themselves.

Some of Mr. Trump’s aides and allies acknowledged on Friday that it was problematic for the president’s chief spokeswoman to spend airtime defending her own credibility.

Ya think?

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