Hitler gaffe just one of Sean Spicer’s many flubs
WASHINGTON An accidental foray into Holocaust revisionism was merely the capstone to an edifice of error erected this week by the spokesman for Donald Trump’s White House.
It was the eye-popping assertion about Adolf Hitler that got all the attention: Sean Spicer suggested the Nazi leader had never used chemical weapons, apparently overlooking agents like hydrogen cyanide, used to murder millions.
Spicer quickly corrected himself — he issued several statements, called a famous Jewish donor to the Republican party to smooth things over, and went on a televised apology tour.
But other brain cramps the day before the Nazi flub, and in the hours after, illustrate why speculation about Spicer’s career life expectancy has become something of a pastime in official Washington.
Consider his first attempt to apologize for the Hitler oversight: it was riddled with errors. He messed up the name of Syria’s strongman, calling him, “Ashad,” and then referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centres.”
He then went on TV and said he wanted to focus on what really matters: Trump’s work to “destabilize” the Middle East.
By the way, Assad isn’t the first leader whose name he’s messed up. He appeared to call Canada’s prime minister Joe Trudeau. And twice, his marble-mouthed version of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sounded something like “Trumble.”
The reference to Joe Trudeau wasn’t his only eyebrow-scrunching foray into Canadian affairs: Spicer also appeared to use the Quebec City mosque attack as an argument for Trump’s travel ban — a shooting allegedly committed by a homegrown hater of Muslims.
Other flubs have been more serious.
Take the one he apparently made just this week, the day before the Hitlerian mixup. Spicer appeared to massively increase the odds of all-out war between the U.S. and Syria — then walked it back.
He suggested from the White House podium that the use of barrel bombs by Syrian President Bashar Assad could provoke an American attack, just like chemical weapons. As one Trump-loving radio host pointed out, that probably means war.
Laura Ingraham expressed frustration with Spicer.
“We’ll be bombing Assad every day,” she said, before turning on the spokesman: “You see how the communications is important here? You have to actually have to be on the same page as the facts and the substance and the logic.”
To White House critics, the basic problem is there is neither logic nor substance.
That’s the view of former spokespeople for Canadian prime ministers. One former aide to Paul Martin said Spicer is in an impossible position — and made it worse by failing to stand up to Trump on Day 1.
On the first day of his presidency, Trump fumed about coverage of the size of his inauguration crowd. He sent Spicer out to make inflated claims about the crowd, making him an instant object of media mockery and a hit on