Sean Spicer: Portrait of a Man on Tilt

Whenever cable news broadcasts the regular White House press briefings these days, there’s a moment you’re likely to catch if you’re able to maintain interest in the proceedings. Sean Spicer will get animated ― shoutish and emotional ― and begin to weave away from whatever the message of the day might be. He’ll pick fights, he’ll air grievances ― mostly he’ll fall back on some flailing, superficial appearance of toughness and feigned stability.
Poker players ― and fans of hacky poker movies ― have a name for this condition: tilt.

This is the quality that “Saturday Night Live” and its guest portrayer of Spicer, Melissa McCarthy, mined for great comedic effects. It’s also what The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noticed, detailed in a Sunday piece titled “Sean Spicer Is Losing His Grip.” Chances are you’ve noticed it too.

Spicer is hardly the first person to run the press room for a Republican president. He’s not the first press secretary who’s faced an unruly press corps. That he may hold to the opinion that the media is untrustworthy, or “the opposition,” hardly makes him unique in American politics, either. And as near as I can tell, he faced all of these challenges when he repped the Republican National Committee ― all without these regular lapses into emotional confusion and needless over-aggression.

But lately Spicer has been scoring own goals, getting into pointless dust-ups and burning his political capital with all of the fervor of a pyromaniac. And based upon Monday’s news, there’s no end in sight, unless he is the victim (or beneficiary?) of some soon-to-come “staff shakeup,” of which rumors abound.

Monday, Axios’ Mike Allen returned to the White House’s efforts to attempt to push back on a New York Times story that reported that Trump’s campaign aides “had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.” This effort involved literally putting rival reporters from The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal on the phone with, among others, CIA Director Mike Pompeo ― an unusual breach of protocol. Reporters were also provided with contact information for Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

On these calls, reporters weren’t given much to go on ― they were just told that the Times story was not accurate. While this didn’t do much to advance the story, the fact that these calls happened was subsequently leaked ― a backdoor way of getting Pompeo’s dispute into the public record. It was also a backdoor way of magnifying the similar assessment of an unknown FBI official, who referred to the Times’ story as “bullshit.” Notably, this FBI official declined to offer this assessment for public consumption ― it, too, was leaked to the press by the White House.

According to Allen’s report, it was Spicer who “personally picked up the phone and connected outside officials with reporters to try to discredit” the Times story, according to an unnamed “senior administration official.”

It is, of course, only natural that Spicer, as press secretary, would try to enable pushback by putting reporters in touch with those who could dispute the story. But many of these specific moves Spicer made will have the unintended effect of diminishing the perceived integrity of these sources. Considering that these efforts ended up only “frustrating the competing reporters” on these calls, as Allen reports, that’s a lot to give up for so very little.