Editor-at-large Bill Kristol discussed Sean Spicer’s first press briefing and President Trump’s unpresidential first days with Jake Tapper on Monday. Spicer was “disastrous” Saturday and “better” at Monday’s first official briefing, Kristol said. The president’s conduct, on the other hand, shows no such signs of improvement:
“I think Sean Spicer as press secretary, fine. He was pretty disastrous Saturday, did better today. But the White House Press Corps has been nice to him. They’re going to have to deal with him for a long time. First day, don’t beat him up—you’d like to get access to White House staff for interviews, to the president himself.”
“But what the president did Saturday at the CIA. I happened to talk to a lot of people who have been in previous administrations—and I guess you can therefore dismiss this as the old way of doing it—but for a president of the United States, a sitting president of the United States, not a candidate, not a spokesman, to go to the CIA, stand in front of that wall, and make the rambling and inappropriate comments the president made, people were seriously worried. I talked to serious people who are not unfriendly to the Trump administration who thought, ‘Oh, my God.'”
Later in the segment, Kristol called Trump’s behavior “totally inappropriate”:
“Why was Spicer having this discussion? Because Donald Trump had raised the issue at the CIA. If it’s just a quarrel between the Press Secretary and the Press Corps, fine. If the Press Secretary’s being deceiving a little, the democracy will survive that. Donald Trump went to the Central Intelligence Agency on the first full day of his presidency and raised the question of whether the media was being unfair in describing the crowd he had at the Inauguration. He treated it as a pep rally, and then his press secretary said, ‘Those CIA people were cheering for the president’—that’s also totally inappropriate. Those are intelligence professionals; they respect the president of the United States.”
