The United States continues to reel from a series of apparent explosive devices sent via the mail targeting prominent Democrats from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton. The going line from the Trump administration remains, at present, that it’s anybody’s fault but their own. Comments White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered this Thursday to reporters about the situation echoed the president’s attempt to pin blame on the media for the attacks.
Just to be clear, from the outset, President Donald Trump has routinely incorporated violence into his rhetoric, from his 2016 suggestion that “Second Amendment people” take care of Hillary Clinton to his recent resounding praise for a Montana GOP Congressman for having bodyslammed a reporter. There remain plenty of examples in between those two, as well.
In whatever universe Sanders lives in, none of that either happened or matters. A reporter asked her:
‘Do you believe that the president bears any responsibility for what we’ve seen over the past few days, and does he regret any of the comments that he’s made about his opponents — or does he at least regret the tone that he’s taken?’
Sanders insisted in response:
‘Look, the president’s condemned violence in all forms, has done that since day one, will continue to do that — but certainly feels that everyone has a role to play.’
Actually no he hasn’t. To offer some more examples, during the 2016 campaign season he invited his supporters to assault protesters, going so far that he insisted he’d bond them out of jail.
Lots of his rhetoric has been less direct. For instance, he’s at this point repeatedly taken to condemning most of the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people,” utilizing rhetoric normally reserved for outright dictators. He’s found supporters, too, in people like Newt Gingrich, who after the apparent bombs were discovered insisted the media had earned that title.
They may like the sound of that rhetoric, but in the real world, it has consequences. CNN was among those targeted by whoever sent the devices in question.
Yet, to Sanders, it’s the media’s own fault — somehow.
She insisted to reporters:
‘Day in, day out, there is a negative tone. Ninety percent of the media attention around this president is negative, despite historic job creation, despite the fact that our economy is booming, despite the fact that trade deals that everybody said couldn’t be made have been made, despite the fact that the president is trying to install law and order at our border and protect the security of Americans from the east coast to the west coast, north and south.’
Watch below.
As an aside here — there’s so much more to the situation than what she lets on. The administration is continuing to attempt to run on the fumes of positive economic trends that were established long before they showed up — and it’s not paying off. The Dow Jones Industrial Index reached a low just this week where all of 2018’s gains were essentially erased.
Sanders continued anyway.
She complained, addressing a CNN reporter in familiarly childish (at best), hyperbolic language:
‘You guys continue to focus only on the negative, and there is a role to play. Yesterday, the very first thing that the president did was come out and condemn the violence. The very first thing your network did was come out and accuse the president of being responsible for it. That is not okay. The first thing should have been to condemn the violence.’
Back in a CNN studio, journalist Jim Sciutto insisted following that clip:
‘What the press secretary of the White House just said there is not true. It’s not the first thing we did as this happened. We reported the news, in fact.’
Yet, the lies likely won’t stop anytime soon.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
