If it weren’t for Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt would be the most proficient liar in the White House.
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There was a time when the daily White House press briefing served a real purpose. Not only did it give reporters an opportunity to ask tough questions, they even had a reasonable expectation of getting a somewhat straight answer.
Sure, there was plenty of spin, but few outright lies. And, since all of that was happening in front of a C-SPAN audience, the public itself could judge for themselves what they thought of the answers.
Sadly, things have been deteriorating for some time. Part of that is the fault of reporters who are mugging for the cameras and trying to produce viral clips by asking gotcha questions that don’t really do much to inform the public.
However, not surprisingly, Donald Trump and the people he chose for the job deserve most of the blame.
That became quite clear when his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, began his tenure with an apparent lie about the inauguration crowd size, and after that things were never the same.
He was succeeded by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was not only dishonest but also added combativeness into the mix. In other words, she would not just lie to reporters (something the current governor of Arkansas has even admitted to), but also acted as if they should be ashamed for asking her questions.
While this may be hard to believe, Karoline Leavitt is much worse.
Not only has she opened up the briefing to a bunch of right-wing yahoos who ask ridiculous questions like “Why is Donald Trump soooo awesome?” or “Is it possible for Democrats to hate America more?”, the current White House press secretary has also taken the bad qualities of her predecessors from the first administration to the next level.
Leavitt is dishonest by default. If Trump weren’t also occasionally in the White House, she would probably be the most proficient liar there. And, when she isn’t lying, then she is spewing propaganda.
And she does so with a nauseating degree of performative indignation.
To illustrate what we are talking about, here is an exchange from Wednesday’s briefing.
It began with a (good) question from a reporter, who asked why Trump had not stressed that the right to protest peacefully is sacrosanct.
It is a valid question, especially since the president had said on Tuesday that people who wanted to protest his military parade on Saturday would be “met with a very big force” without distinguishing between violent and non-violent protesters.
When asked about that statement, and whether Trump would allow peaceful protests, Leavitt dismissed it as a “stupid question,” which really goes back to her combativeness.
There is nothing “stupid” about asking for a clarification of something the president himself had said.
In any case, the reporter in this clip wants to know why Trump has not emphasized the importance of the First Amendment and where it ranks in his hierarchy of interests.
In response, Leavitt did her thing… and we’ll do a line-by-line analysis of her answer.
“The president supports the right of Americans to peacefully protest,” she said. “He supports the First Amendment.”
That is, obviously, false. In fact, Trump is perhaps the most anti-First Amendment president in history with his constant attempts to silence, through intimidation and lawsuits, media outlets that do not do his bidding.
In addition, he was clear that “any” protester would be met with force on Saturday. Also, it’s not as though Trump usually tolerates anybody who is opposed to him in any way.
That was just the beginning.
“But that is not the majority of the behavior that we have seen taking place in Los Angeles,” Leavitt added. “We have seen mobs of violent rioters and agitators assaulting law enforcement officers, assaulting our federal immigration authorities.”
That is patently ridiculous.
There were thousands of protesters and very few of them were arrested, most of them for non-violent crimes like failure to disperse or looting. In addition, most of the violence came from law enforcement officers who fired non-lethal ammunition at protesters.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department, only a handful of officers were hurt, and none of them seriously.
So, just about everything Leavitt said is a lie.
But it didn’t stop there.
After saying that the goal of the administration is to establish law and order, she added that the ICE raids that triggered the protests were about “removing public safety threats.”
That is also incorrect.
The targets of the raids were not hardened criminals, but rather undocumented immigrants at their places of work.
It is also ludicrous to claim that escalating the situation by introducing a military force with no training in crowd control to the mix will help establish law and order.
Predictably, ever since Trump deployed thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of Marines to Los Angeles, things have gotten worse.
Leavitt then made up that there were “hundreds of people who have assaulted law enforcement officers” before getting to her grand finale: feigning indignation and putting words in the mouth of the reporter who had correctly noted that her statement about the majority of protesters being violent was false.
“Are you saying that that’s appropriate behavior?” she asked, which is not what anybody has been saying.
But, of course, that doesn’t matter to Leavitt because she so perfectly epitomizes not only how Trump operates but also everybody else in his administration.
First you lie, and then you keep lying until you are explicitly challenged. And when that happens, double down and go on the attack.
That might be great for viral clips on Fox News, but it’s bad for democracy.
At this point, these briefings have no value apart from showing that Leavitt hardly ever says anything that is true.
However, that’s not news to anybody who is paying attention.
