I was startled awake by my alarm at 6 A.M. on Saturday morning, January 21, 2017, the morning after Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth President of the United States. I’m a deep sleeper, but very few of my days in Washington, D.C., began serenely. More often than not, the first moments of each morning began with a suddenly racing heartbeat and a scramble for my phone to see if the President had fired off any tweets while I was asleep.
As I rolled out of bed, I stubbed my toe on one of the dozens of unpacked plastic boxes stacked throughout my apartment. Seeing Megan still sleeping soundly in the tiny, dimly lit room, I suppressed the urge to give voice to the pain and instead just hobbled to the bathroom. Megan was excited about our new adventure, although it was painful to leave behind our church and friends in Birmingham. She didn’t enjoy the controversy that constantly swirled around Trump—and therefore around me, too—but when asked about it, she’d say, “Very few people get this opportunity, so if we don’t take it and try to make a difference, then we can’t complain that no one in D.C. is representing our beliefs.”
We had leased our new apartment without even seeing it. After googling “apartments close to the White House,” I had chosen the Woodward Building. It looked nice enough in the pictures online, and it had a serviceable gym, killer rooftop view of the city, and, perhaps most important, an outdoor terrace where we could let out our dog—a ten-pound shih tzu named Minnie—without having to walk to a nearby park.
Unfortunately, the apartment itself was only 687 square feet, roughly the size of the master bedroom suite in our 3,215-square-foot home in Alabama. Even worse, it cost more per month than our fifteen-year mortgage in Birmingham.
The cost of living in Washington, D.C., is one of the primary reasons that people who stay there for an extended period of time lose touch with much of the rest of the country. The costs are inflated. The salaries are inflated. The egos are inflated. But everyone carries on like everything is normal.
Shaking off the pain in my throbbing toe, I jumped in the shower, threw on a suit, and stepped outside into the quiet, empty streets of downtown Washington.
Looking to my left, the low-sitting fog was obscuring my view of the Washington Monument, about a half mile down Fifteenth Street. A block away, I could see that the short strip of Pennsylvania Avenue right in front of the White House was barricaded and still housing the temporary bleachers from which the First Family and their guests had watched the Inaugural Parade the day before.
The placid morning stood in stark contrast to the previous day’s events. Just two blocks away, protesters had smashed the windows of Bank of America and Starbucks and destroyed a rented limousine while chanting, “Not my President!” Broken glass still littered nearby Franklin Square, where just hours before police had deployed flashbangs and tear gas to disperse the violent crowds.
Slipping on my white Apple earbuds, I began the 0.7-mile walk to the General Services Administration building, the headquarters of the Trump presidential transition. Augustana’s “Twenty Years” provided the backing track as I walked past Lafayette Square in front of the White House, with the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson tipping his cap while riding his horse in the Battle of New Orleans at its center.
The song had long been one of my favorites. No lyrics have better captured the feeling of leaving home to chase a dream. But it took on particular significance for me when I left my wife in Alabama for several months to work on the Trump campaign in Manhattan.
“Just fall asleep with the TV, darling. I’ll be back again.”
The transition office was quiet when I arrived; most staff would not get in for another hour. While I didn’t have anything particularly pressing on my agenda, I came in early in anxious anticipation of getting cleared into the White House for the first time.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, cutting off the music, and I pulled it out to see “Sean Spicer” on the screen.
To that point, my personal experiences with Sean had varied wildly. We had a tortured relationship with the RNC in general, but it was never that bad with Sean in particular.
During the campaign, he’d been a prankster in Trump Tower. If you left your computer unlocked and unattended, he’d send emails from your account and giddily await your reaction when you received a confused response from a colleague. He loved doing TV appearances and craved positive reviews from the staff. “How’d I do?” he’d ask after coming back upstairs from a satellite TV hit.
Then, just before Election Day, when the polls and pundits were all foreseeing a colossal Clinton victory, word got back to the campaign that Spicer had done off-the-record briefings with reporters, blaming our impending defeat on the campaign while defending the RNC’s heroic efforts to keep the Titanic afloat.
Things got really crazy during the transition after we won.
At first Jason Miller was slated to be Communications Director, and Spicer was slated to be Press Secretary. During daily conference calls with members of the press, Spicer was clearly subordinated to Miller in the pecking order—in practice, if not in the org chart. But Miller suddenly backed out of the job after his adulterous relationship with a female campaign aide went public. That left Spicer to take on the dual role of both press and communications. This may seem like a natural fit, but while press and comms are inextricably linked, their day-to-day functions are dramatically different.
The press team deals with whatever is happening right this second. They’re largely a reactive operation. Comms, on the other hand, is supposed to look up at the horizon and plan ahead. They’re supposed to be proactive and not allow themselves to get sucked into the daily maelstrom of the news cycle. In addition to the differences in their tactical and strategic roles, combining the two jobs also created management issues that Spicer was clearly not interested in dealing with. This was an overwhelming amount of work for even the most confident and competent managers—and Sean was not known to be either. His personality went through a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–like change almost immediately.
Spicer stopped answering phone calls from campaign aides trying to iron out the details of their White House job—or whether or not they would have one at all. At one point, when word was spreading that campaign aides were being frozen out, Reince Priebus, who by then had been named White House Chief of Staff, stopped by the comms area of Trump Tower and reassured everyone, “If you want a job in the White House, you’ve got one.” The group sat in silence, not sure what to say or what was true.
For me, the uncertainty was becoming a problem. If I was going to take a job in the White House, I’d have to sell two houses, divest from my company, move halfway across the country, and help my wife find a job—and I had to do it all in two months.
Though we’d gotten along fine during the campaign, now that his job was assured, Spicer never answered a single one of my phone calls during the transition, and called me only once. He offered me the job of Special Assistant to the President and Director of White House Message Strategy, told me I’d be working in the West Wing, and laid out what my salary would be. I wouldn’t find out until I’d moved to D.C. that my salary was actually thirty thousand dollars less than Spicer had promised in that phone call.
When I broached the subject with him, he told me, “You should be honored to even have a chance to work for the President” and I should “go work somewhere else” if I didn’t like it. I dropped the issue. I didn’t need the money, I just didn’t think it was right he hadn’t kept his word. And it wasn’t just me; others were uprooting their lives based on his promises. It was unprofessional. And Spicer had seemingly turned into another person overnight.
When he called me the morning after Inauguration Day, he got right to the point.
“The attorneys are getting you set up this morning,” he said, “so you need to get over here as fast as you can. It’s a workday.”
Most staffers would be on-boarded in waves over the next week, so I was excited to be among the first getting into the building.
I hurried down the wide hallway of the GSA building and into a conference room where several senior aides to the President and Vice President were sitting.
“Let’s get started,” a tall, slender man at the front of the room said. “I’m Stefan Passantino, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy White House Counsel.”
He explained that he handled all compliance issues for the White House Counsel’s Office, and he was giving us a crash course on adhering to the ethics rules of being a commissioned officer in the Executive Office of the President.
“I’m going to get this out of the way because I know you’re not going to like it,” he said. “You can no longer text each other about work-related issues. You’re going to get a government phone. It won’t have text messaging enabled because we haven’t yet worked it out to comply with the Presidential Records Act.”
There was an audible groan from several staffers, particular from the Advance Office, where they relied on the ease and quickness of text messages to coordinate their bosses’ movements.
After an extensive discussion about the gift rules, Stefan deemed us fully briefed on the basics and cleared us to be driven into the White House complex for the first time by Secret Service. We piled into a fifteen-passenger van and made the two-block drive, pausing at two checkpoints and ultimately coming to a stop on West Executive Drive between the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB).
Once inside the EEOB, we plowed through a mountain of paperwork—health-care and retirement plans, bank account numbers, and every piece of personal information imaginable. We were then shuffled down the hall for IT training and received our government-issued laptops and cell phones.
“Can we pay out of our own pocket to get a Mac laptop instead of this thing?” someone asked, drawing a chuckle, followed by an apologetic “no” from the career White House IT staffer.
The final stop in the gauntlet was the Secret Service and Travel offices in the basement. They captured our fingerprints electronically, snapped head shots for our diplomatic passports, handed us our White House IDs, and sent us on our way.
“Now what?” I asked one of the career staffers who had guided us through the process.
“I don’t know what you do here, man,” he said with a smile. “You’re free to go figure it out.”
I walked out of the EEOB and back onto the driveway where we had been dropped off and saw a large white awning jutting out of the West Wing, emblazoned with the Seal of the President. I could feel my heartbeat in my chest as I walked under the awning, through two sets of double doors, and into the ground floor of the West Wing for the first time.
Just inside, I stopped at the desk of a uniformed Secret Service agent, who glanced up at me with a puzzled look.
“Do I, like, swipe in, or what?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “You’re wearing a blue badge. That’s all you need.” He looked back down at his computer and I slowly walked toward an open hallway with low ceilings and walls covered with large, empty black picture frames. All of the Obamas’ pictures had been removed, and over the next twenty-four hours, every frame would be filled with pictures of the Trumps and various scenes from the inauguration.
Turning to the right, I walked hesitantly into a dimly lit corridor that quickly dead-ended at a soda machine. Glancing to my right, there was a white phone on the wall beside a dark wooden door, and what appeared to be a keyhole-style video camera.
SITUATION ROOM, read the plaque on the door.
I retraced my steps back out to the ground-floor hallway and walked past several tiny offices filled with people I had never seen before, through some double doors, and up a narrow stairwell.
Another uniformed Secret Service agent seated at the top of the stairs nodded in my direction and returned to reading a magazine. I walked past her as she pressed a button on her desk, automatically opening a set of double doors in front of me facing east toward the White House residence. I immediately recognized the White House Rose Garden, in spite of its lack of color in the winter cold.
Just up the colonnade I could see where Franklin D. Roosevelt had sat outside the Oval Office and contemplated how to defeat Hitler. John F. Kennedy had laughed while walking down this corridor with his young son, John Jr. President Ford and his wife, Betty, had traced these steps to the Oval Office immediately after the disgraced Richard Nixon had departed from the South Lawn on Marine One for the final time. President Reagan leaned against one of these columns for a portrait. George W. Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai had talked here in 2004, neither fully understanding just how intertwined our two countries would be in the coming decade. Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, had walked this exact pathway with Pope Francis.
My senses were heightened by the weight of history all around me. I breathed in deeply, as if the very air were infused with the spirit of the great men and women who had walked here before. But I also couldn’t help but notice every crack in the sidewalk, every nick on the white walls, and the overall plainness of so much of the West Wing.
I was reminded in that moment that Thomas Jefferson had greeted the British ambassador at the front door of the White House wearing bedroom slippers, sparking a diplomatic incident but sending the message loud and clear that we are not a monarchy. Our leaders are not demigods, clothed in majesty and working in a palace. The West Wing continues to be a powerful democratic symbol to every head of state who visits because of, not in spite of, its obvious flaws.
I walked back inside through the double doors, the Secret Service agent once again opening them for me automatically. Passing by her desk, I turned the corner and felt a slight chill shoot through my spine. About fifteen yards ahead I glimpsed for the first time the curved walls and distinctively bright lighting that make the Oval Office stand out in an otherwise nondescript and dim set of offices.
For some reason my first thought in that moment was of my grandfather Lonnie Sims, who had passed away less than two years before at the age of eighty-nine. He lived most of his life in Cleveland, Mississippi, a rural town in the state’s impoverished Delta region. I recalled him marveling the first time we video-chatted on our phones.
“I remember picking cotton for a dollar in pennies for a hundred-pound bag,” he said. “I never even imagined something like this would be possible.”
I wish he could have seen this, I thought to myself, keeping my emotions from getting the best of me.
I then realized that I could hear muffled voices coming from a nearby office and walked toward it.
“I don’t give a s—,” I heard as I walked closer, recognizing Spicer’s distinctive New England bite. “We need to figure something out in a hurry.”
I pushed through the door into the Press Secretary’s office, which by West Wing standards is a sprawling workspace, with giant windows, a sitting area, a small conference table, and a crescent-shaped desk.
Spicer was pacing behind the desk and furiously chomping on a wad of chewing gum. Seated around the office were several of Spicer’s aides, including Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Deputy Communications Director Raj Shah, and Sean Cairncross, a senior adviser to Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.
“What’s going on?” I asked, sensing the tension in the room.
“The President’s pissed,” Shah said. “Like, really pissed.”
“About what?” I followed up.
“It’s the coverage,” Spicer quipped. He looked riled up, too. “He’s upstairs watching the TV and he’s getting madder and madder about it—the inaugural address, the crowd size, this stupid MLK bust thing, all of it.”
I had not followed the news closely that morning because I was so busy going through the on-boarding process, but the President’s inaugural address, the group explained, was being widely panned for being “dark and angry.”
“George Washington gave us the ambition of a quadrennial, peaceful, democratic transfer of power,” wrote one New York Times columnist. “Abraham Lincoln appealed to our better natures and our charity in the midst of civil war. Franklin Roosevelt gave us the strength not to be afraid. John Kennedy inspired us to serve our nation. Ronald Reagan talked of a prosperous America as a beacon of democracy around the world. And Barack Obama talked about the hope of which he was the living embodiment. Donald Trump gave us ‘American carnage.’”
Former President George W. Bush, who had been on the rostrum with Trump, was quoted as saying “that was some weird s—.” The President never mentioned that remark to me, but considering his long-running feud with the Bushes, I can say with a high degree of confidence that he wasn’t happy about it.
TV talking heads were lambasting the remarks, which was bad enough for a famously media-focused President, but he was actually angrier about two other story lines.
First, Zeke Miller, a reporter for Time magazine, had fired off a tweet claiming that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. that had been in the Oval Office during the Obama administration had been removed. He also made this claim in a White House pool report that went out to news outlets and various other offices across D.C.
Trump’s decision to remove the bust of an iconic civil rights activist from the Oval Office—as one of his first acts as President, no less—played right into the narrative that he was, at best, an enabler and tacit supporter of racists or, at worst, an outright racist himself. It was an irresistible story for eager journalists with itchy Twitter fingers. Except it wasn’t true. Miller corrected his error in subsequent tweets, saying the bust was still there and had been obscured by an agent and a door. But the damage was already done. Stories based on Miller’s initial false reporting were spreading all over Twitter and Facebook. In this instance, Trump was totally justified in his fury, and it ratcheted up the tension in our already frayed relationship with the press corps.
On the next one, however, Trump wasn’t on nearly as sure footing, and the result was one of the most infamous moments of his entire presidency—a moment for which I share some of the blame.
Images emerged from The New York Times showing Trump’s Inauguration Day crowd looking much smaller than President Obama’s in 2009. On one hand, who really cared? Barack Obama had been the first African American president in our history. It was a seminal moment. Of course people would want to celebrate or commemorate that event, particularly African Americans who’d waited so long to see that day. It made sense that his crowd would be historic, too. On top of that, Obama’s inauguration enjoyed clear skies, while Trump’s was a rainy affair. You can always put on another layer and bundle up, but the prospect of spending hours trouncing through the mud and standing in the rain without an umbrella is too much for a lot of people.
But that’s not how President Trump thought—particularly after, at least in his view, the media deliberately lied about the MLK bust and went out of its way to attack his inaugural address. To him, these were attempts to humiliate him and perhaps even delegitimize his electoral victory. As noted, the President loved to tout his crowd sizes on the campaign trail. It was the only metric he could reliably point to as evidence that the polls showing Hillary Clinton winning—all of them—were wrong.
On Election Night, once it was clear that he was going to win, Trump privately revealed what he had been thinking as massive crowds kept showing up at rallies even though he kept lagging in most polls.
“I kept thinking, ‘Look at all these people. What am I missing? How could we be losing? It makes no sense.’”
So the current media effort to make him look less popular than Obama was the equivalent of a schoolyard argument escalating into a brawl after one kid brought the other’s mom into the conversation. It was waving a red flag to a bull. It just couldn’t stand.
But our argument about crowd size was much more difficult this time. The images being displayed side by side online and on television had been taken forty-five minutes before each President’s swearing in. The comparisons didn’t appear to be close. Not even remotely. President Obama’s crowd was much larger, perhaps even twice as large. Anger and frustration can bring out the irrationality in all of us. Deputy campaign manager David Bossie used to compare the President to a teakettle. You need to just let him blow off some steam as a release valve. But sometimes he’s more like a pressure cooker ready to explode. This was apparently one of those times.
“He wants me to say it was the largest crowd to ever witness an inauguration,” Spicer deadpanned. The way he said it made it sound like he didn’t believe it himself. He had eyes like the rest of us.
On top of that, he explained, the President wanted him to use the crowd picture and the erroneous reports about the MLK bust being removed as evidence that the media was bent on reporting “fake news” and delegitimizing his election and presidency.
Raj Shah said what most everyone was thinking in that moment. “How the f— are we going to find evidence to support the crowd thing?”
“The bigger issue is that this is going to be Sean’s first time behind the podium,” Cairncross responded. “Hell of a way to start.”
That profoundly important insight didn’t even seem to register with Spicer. In fairness, it didn’t really impact the rest of us as much as it should have, either. But we were following Spicer’s lead. He was laser focused on proving himself to the boss. The President liked Sean personally, but he had always eyed him, a lifelong member of the establishment that had desperately tried to prevent Trump from clinching the GOP nomination, with suspicion. He was never really one of his guys.
“We need to start writing this,” Spicer interjected. “We don’t have time to go round and round about it anymore.” He looked at me. “Can you write it?”
I grabbed a spare laptop and started pecking out notes as other people threw out ideas.
Tom Barrack, a billionaire friend of Trump’s who had chaired the Inaugural Committee, came in, having heard the President’s frustrations firsthand. He laid out an idea, which we all assumed he had shared with Trump.
“Over one hundred thousand more people used the D.C. Metro transit system yesterday than they did on Obama’s Inauguration Day,” he explained. “I’ve got the statistics. It’s a fact.”
This, everyone agreed, was notable. It sure sounded notable, anyway. And authoritative. Nobody stopped to make certain it was true. Nobody had time. Spicer, in all his manic glory, had worked us all into a frenzy. And Mr. Barrack had more.
“You also have to understand that we had a great deal more fencing and magnetometers on the National Mall than Obama did. So even though they took those pictures at the same time, it’s still not apples to apples. It took our people longer to get out onto the Mall.”
I was typing as quickly as I could, following along as Mr. Barrack spouted off numbers and details, and taking notes on everything coming out of Sean’s mouth—which was a torrent of expletives with a few salient points scattered in between. In the moments when he’d take a breath, I’d try to synthesize whatever I had into a coherent statement. We had no idea that nearly everything we were being told was wrong.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team was assembling visual aids that Sean would display on the large-screen televisions behind the podium in the Briefing Room.
To pull together those assets and additional facts, Raj was in constant communication with RNC research aides and incoming White House staffers who were still working out of the General Services Administration building. Raj was the prototypical anti-Trump establishment Republican. He’d jumped at the chance to work in the White House, even if it was for a president he loathed. But he had deep experience and a legit skill set. He was a talented operative. He exuded a calm confidence in the midst of a crisis. I viewed him as someone I could work with, past issues aside.
“All things considered,” Cairncross said of Spicer’s predicament, “this isn’t that bad. You actually have some decent talking points here.”
Spicer was standing in front of a mirror, applying makeup and inspecting his light gray suit jacket.
“Someone give the press a fifteen-minute warning,” Spicer said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“How do we print?” I asked.
No one seemed to know, but Spicer’s assistant went to find out from the White House IT staff.
Suddenly the computer made a loud beep. It’d been a long time since I had used a PC rather than a Mac, so I looked down to see if it was perhaps an audible signal that the battery power was getting low. Instead, to my great horror, the computer seemed to be going into some type of emergency shutdown. I scrambled to plug it in, thinking its battery might have run out of juice. Nothing. I frantically hit the space bar. Black screen.
Breathe.
Reboot.
Surely the document would still be in there, just waiting for me to hit “print.”
It wasn’t.
The draft remarks that we had collectively spent hours researching, compiling, writing, and editing had vanished forever.
Right on cue, an assistant came back into the room and announced, “We’re set, we gave them the fifteen-minute warning.”
Everyone froze in horror. Spicer had been on edge since the moment I walked in the room, and I thought this might be the tipping point for him. His face seemed to turn bloodred in an instant and his eyes narrowed on me. Would he spontaneously combust? Would he unleash a barrage of expletives and march off in rage? He took a deep breath and rallied.
“No, we’re not set. But let’s fix it. C’mon, let’s go. Start writing.”
Between Spicer, Cairncross, and myself, we pieced the prepared remarks back together as fast as we could. Meanwhile, the White House press corps had already packed themselves into the Briefing Room. The clock was ticking.
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus came into the room, saw the scramble taking place, and was confused. “I don’t think you need to rush like this,” he said. “I mean, the President isn’t just sitting up there counting the seconds until this happens. You’ve got plenty of time to think it through and get it right.”
Reince had worked closely with Sean at the RNC and knew him better than anybody. Maybe he sensed the disaster ahead. In any event, he offered advice only a fool would ignore. We were those fools.
“We already notified the press that I’m coming out in a few minutes,” Spicer shot back.
In retrospect, of course, we were engaging in a senseless, unrecoverable act of self-sabotage. One that not only set the Press Secretary off on a bad note, but did enormous damage to the White House’s credibility on day one. Here he was, moments away from engaging in a very public act that—if botched—could live with him forever, and he seemed to be mindlessly rushing into it as if the only thing to do was, to use his words, get it over with.
About twenty minutes after giving the fifteen-minute warning, Spicer dispatched his assistant to give a two-minute warning. The remarks were printed, Spicer took one last look at himself in the mirror, and our small team moved toward the Press Briefing Room.
In those last few minutes, as he prepared to throw away whatever credibility he’d built over decades in Washington, Spicer was quiet as a church mouse, almost like he was walking to his own execution. Realizing he was still nervously chewing on the ever-present stick of gum in his mouth, he quickly found a garbage can to throw it away.
As we filed into the staff seating area along the side wall, I was stunned at how packed the room was. In the couple of times I had come to the White House as a journalist during the Obama administration, there were always at least a couple of empty seats. Not this time. If it had been a Trump rally, the President would have touted the number of people waiting outside to get in.
I walked past the chairs along the side of the stage—there were only four of them and there were seven of us—and sat down on the floor. This earned me a quick scolding from a photographer anxiously awaiting Spicer’s arrival. I was in his shot and needed to move. I walked back and crouched between the first chair and the doorway.
Moments later the door slid open and Sean walked in.
Camera lenses fluttered at a machine gun’s pace as Spicer shuffled to the podium, printed remarks on loose-leaf paper in his right hand.
At 5:39 P.M., he began speaking—aggressively.
Good evening. Thank you, guys, for coming. I know our first official press briefing is going to be on Monday, but I wanted to give you a few updates on the President’s activities. But before I get to the news of the day, I think I’d like to discuss a little bit of the coverage of the last twenty-four hours.
Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the President said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting. For all the talk about the proper use of Twitter, two instances yesterday stand out.
One was a particularly egregious example in which a reporter falsely tweeted out that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. After it was pointed out that this was just plain wrong, the reporter casually reported and tweeted out and tried to claim that a Secret Service agent must have just been standing in front of it. This was irresponsible and reckless.
Secondly, photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual. This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.
Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion.
We do know a few things, so let’s go through the facts. We know that from the platform where the President was sworn in, to Fourth Street, it holds about 250,000 people. From Fourth Street to the media tent is about another 220,000. And from the media tent to the Washington Monument, another 250,000 people. All of this space was full when the President took the oath of office. We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. Metro public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 that used it for President Obama’s last inaugural. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe. Even The New York Times printed a photograph showing a misrepresentation of the crowd in the original tweet in their paper, which showed the full extent of the support, depth in crowd, and intensity that existed.
These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.…
The President is committed to unifying our country, and that was the focus of his inaugural address. This kind of dishonesty in the media, the challenging—that bringing about our nation together is making it more difficult.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. And I’m here to tell you that it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well. The American people deserve better. And as long as he serves as the messenger for this incredible movement, he will take his message directly to the American people, where his focus will always be.…
At 5:44 P.M. he walked offstage. The whole thing had only lasted five and a half minutes, but sitting crouched in the corner motionless, trying not to become a meme on TV, had caused my legs to fall asleep. I stood with the help of the armrest of the chair beside me, and our group filed out of the Briefing Room and back to Spicer’s office.
Spicer was sweating profusely as he took off his jacket and sat down behind his desk.
“Good job, Sean,” one of Spicer’s staff piped up.
“Yeah, difficult circumstances but I think that went about as well as could be hoped,” added Shah.
The rest of the group added their congratulations and encouraged Sean, who was holding it together in spite of the palpable nervous energy still coursing through his veins.
“Turn the TV up,” was all he could muster.
The Press Secretary’s office has a bank of TVs in a wooden cabinet on the west side of the room, and every network was carrying reaction to Spicer’s debut behind the podium.
He was being disemboweled.
The first thing I noticed in the replays was that his suit fit terribly. This was a point that the President would later make as well.
But even more disconcerting was that every argument he made was being shredded. The Metro ridership numbers were wrong. Spicer’s point about additional magnetometers and fencing seemed dubious. Our comment about this inauguration being the first time floor coverings were used on the National Mall was quickly proven incorrect. Our touting of the worldwide viewing audience—almost certainly the largest ever by virtue of high-speed internet’s global proliferation—was garnering eye rolls.
Many of the “facts” we had been given by various well-meaning individuals were just plain incorrect, and we hadn’t fact-checked them. It was a devastating mistake. We were already on shaky footing trying to argue about the crowd’s size to begin with, but this just made it all worse.
Ari Fleischer, who had served as Press Secretary for President George W. Bush, had the most spot-on tweet of the night: “This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching.”
He indeed was watching. And he didn’t like what he saw.
“I don’t know what that was,” the President would later tell me about Spicer’s performance, “but it wasn’t what I wanted, that I can tell you.”
Months later, after he had left the White House, The New York Times asked Spicer if he regretted his first turn behind the podium, dubbing it “one of his most infamous moments as Press Secretary.”
“Of course I do, absolutely,” he replied.
But sincere regrets don’t mend shattered credibility. From the very first moments of his tenure to the day he left the White House for the last time, Spicer’s trustworthiness was a constant issue.
Quietly, without the glare of the lights, I was embarrassed, too. I would go on to write countless presidential statements and remarks, numerous @realDonaldTrump and @PressSec tweets, thousands of talking points, and dozens of op-eds in major publications. Nothing I wrote was a bigger disaster—and more damaging to the credibility of the White House—than the first piece of work I put my hands to.
Partly, I hoped, this could be attributed to typical first-day chaos. But the chaos never really went away.