When the White House blatantly lies, it’s not just breaking political norms but breaching a sacred trust with the American people.
By now, we are used to President Trump’s caustic relationship with the press. It’s destructive, but it’s an old story at this point.
What deeply troubles us is the step his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, took last week after the latest terrible exchange between Trump and CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
It’s one thing to beat down the press. It’s another thing to blatantly lie about something that happened right before our eyes. And it’s another thing still, almost beyond belief, to share a video of that occurrence that distorts the reality of what truly happened.
We can accept that a president and the press can have a terrible relationship. What we can’t accept is accusing a man of putting “his hands on a young woman,” when he did no such thing, and then sharing a mash-up of images that falsely suggest that he chopped at the arm of a young White House intern when she reached for the microphone he was holding.
That simply is not the truth of what happened.
Sanders was there. She saw what happened. She cannot even offer the thin excuse that she spoke without all of the facts — something no press secretary should ever do anyway. Instead, she lied, and what’s worse, she attempted to “prove” that lie by disseminating a video clip created by an editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars, a site known for advancing toxic political conspiracy theories — and this in an age when people are already manipulated by false images and words that flow so readily on the internet.
When a press secretary for the president of the United States speaks, we expect her to tell the truth. Not only did Sanders ignore that protocol, but she dove in head-first to promulgate a narrative that had no basis in fact.
President Trump has plenty of people in the public realm to defend him on television and elsewhere. But Sarah Sanders is a direct line from the President to the American people. She should know better than to advance specious claims on behalf of President Trump when her duty is, to tell the truth.
— The Dallas Morning News