Donald Trump’s spokesman quits

By J.A. | WASHINGTON, DC

DONALD TRUMP seems to enjoy publicly humiliating people, especially those in his power. There was the Venezuelan beauty queen, Alicia Machado, he nicknamed “Miss Piggy” and made to work out in front of a pack of male journalists. There is Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, one of the first senior Republicans to endorse Mr Trump, who the president repaid by cracking fat jokes at his expense and passing over him for cabinet appointment. But no Trump hireling has been more ridiculed, by the president and at times, it has seemed, half of America, than the chief White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, who, despairing of his treatment, abruptly resigned on July 21st.

However many millions of dollars Mr Spicer is about to make off the back of his six-month spell as Mr Trump’s official mouthpiece, it may not be enough. After just six months in Mr Trump’s service, Mr Spicer’s reputation is in pieces. Formerly a respected press chief at the Republican National Committee, he was dispatched by the president, on his debut appearance in the West Wing briefing room, to lie ridiculously about the size of Mr Trump’s rather modest inauguration crowd. The ceremony, Mr Spicer claimed, had drawn the “largest audience ever to watch an inauguration, period—both in person and around the globe.” This was so manifestly false and so instantly damaging to Mr Spicer’s credibility that there would probably have been no recovering from it even if Mr Trump had not continued to send Mr Spicer forth to tell obvious falsehoods. As an instrument of his master’s vanity and attachment to untruths, Mr Spicer became a figure of fun. He was compared to the Iraqi information minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf—he who denied that Baghdad was under attack even as American tanks could be seen rolling in.