How Sarah Sanders became Trump's liar-in-chief

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How Sarah Sanders became Trump's liar-in-chief

The White House press secretary’s calm under intense pressure – and serial fibbing – has given the president’s administration a very effective, female public face
Hadley Freeman


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Sanders eagerly placed herself at the centre of the media storm when the White House revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. Photograph: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

One of the earliest photos from the Trump presidency set the look – or so we thought back then – of the weird new world in which we all found ourselves. It showed the then freshly inaugurated Potus signing the global gag rule, which states that the US will remove funding for any overseas organisation that offers abortions. A ring of men watched Donald Trump sign this order: Reince Priebus, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and so on. This, we assumed in the comparatively innocent era of early 2017, was what the Trump presidency itself would look like: patriarchal, male, anti-female. And yet one of the strangest and most striking elements of Trump’s administration is that, second only to the limelight-loving president himself, the most public faces of this administration have been women.


First it was his daughter Ivanka Trump, the woman who claims to care so much about families that she works for a president who will be remembered for his cruel family separation policy. Then it was Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the president, who coined the handy euphemism “alternative facts” – better known as lies. And now it’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary since July 2017, who has assumed centre stage as Trump’s most effective patriarchal footsoldier.

Sanders eagerly placed herself at the centre of a media storm last week when she defended the White House’s decision to revoke CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press pass by claiming that in a press briefing Acosta placed “his hands on a young woman”. Of course, as everyone who watched the briefing on TV could see, what actually happened was that the female intern, encouraged by Trump, tried to grab the microphone away from Acosta when he started to ask a second question. To back up her blatant lie, Sanders retweeted a clearly doctored video, originally tweeted by conspiracist blog InfoWars, in which two seconds of tape were sped up to make it look like Acosta somehow karate chopped the female intern. “This conduct is absolutely unacceptable,” tweeted Sanders, apparently unaware that she works for a man who bragged about grabbing women by the vulva during his campaign. Except, of course, Sanders isn’t unaware of that at all. She was already working on the campaign when the tape of Trump’s 2005 conversation with Billy Bush was leaked, and it was Sanders, an evangelical Christian, who went on CNN to defend her boss afterwards. “Both of these candidates are flawed. There is no perfect person,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper. When Tapper asked her if Trump would apologise to the women he assaulted, Sanders retorted, “Has Hillary Clinton apologised to the four American lives that were lost in Benghazi?”


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Sanders is by all reports a genuinely devoted Trump defender. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters


Sanders is, in many ways, the most fascinating person in the Trump administration. Whereas vice-president Mike Pence, another evangelical, generally gives the impression of keeping Trump and his foibles at arm’s length, Sanders is a full-throated and, by all reports, genuinely devoted Trump defender. Like Trump’s favourite woman in the world, Ivanka, she is a loyal daughter, having grown up watching her father, the ludicrous Mike Huckabee, repeatedly run for president. Trump values few things more than filial loyalty, and he rushes to Sanders’ defence when she is criticised by journalists, as if he was protecting her against the playground bullies. And like Trump’s evangelical base, Sanders, who considers her faith to be the defining part of her life, somehow makes the mental leap of overlooking his multiple divorces, infidelities and general sleaziness because he styles himself as anti-abortion. (“It’s not hard to see why evangelicals support him,” Sanders’ husband, Bryan, told Politico last week.) She is an interesting answer to that eternal mystery that is Trump’s appeal to the Christian right, and his appeal among large swathes of white women.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/13/sarah-sanders-lies-white-house-female-face

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1. The christian right is neither.