By Tony Messenger
Metro Columnist
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The first lie seems almost inconsequential looking back.
There, at the White House podium where presidential spokespeople had represented the views of American presidents for decades, Sean Spicer waxed not so eloquently about how President Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd was the biggest in history. It wasn’t of course, and thus began the new normal of presidential press conferences, where Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany and others have told the American people lies on behalf of their president.
There has always been a certain wink-and-a-nod relationship between political reporters and press secretaries, whose job it has always been to present the news in the best possible version for their bosses. There are times, or have been, when there is no good version of the truth for a president, or governor or senator, and thus, the spokesman offers a “no comment,” or gives a statement to a reporter that the reporter properly ignores because it is immaterial to the topic at hand.
But from that first lie Spicer told, to where we are today, where the president is in a hospital bed being treated for COVID-19, and the White House has to correct multiple statements from doctors, and the chief of staff offers contradictory information about the president’s health, this “new normal” has reached a place of epic madness, where the American people cannot trust anything that comes from the mouths of either the president or the people who speak for him.
When Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden declared during the debate, “Everybody knows the president is a liar,” he was telling the truth.
That’s a tragedy, no matter your politics.