‘Amoral, monstrous’: Critics unload on Dancing with the Stars for inviting ‘professional liar’ Sean Spicer

“To treat Spicer, and his reason for notoriety, as a harmless joke is to whitewash the harm of what he did, which was to say things so absurdly false that he invited his political side to join him in denying their own eyeballs, to encourage people to believe that facts don’t matter if they hurt your team,” Poniewozik wrote.

“To put him on a silly reality show is to say that he committed a silly offense and that you’re silly if you still make a big deal about it,” he added.

Writing for Variety, TV critic Caroline Framke said that “Spicer’s previous life as a professional liar should really disqualify him from public life, period.”

Framke wrote that the decision to include him in the show “helps to re-contextualize his place in American history as a ridiculous oddity rather than the loathsome truth of his ascendance.”

Film and TV critic Mo Ryan said that she would “never think it’s an amusing diversion” for the former press secretary to be on the show.

“He defended and lied about amoral, monstrous if not criminal policies and actions. Way to launder amorality, ABC. Gross,” she tweeted.

Even Tom Bergeron, the host of the hit show, said in a statement that he had hoped to avoid political hot potatoes during this season. He said he had met with the show’s executive producer and said he hoped the season “would be a joyful respite from our exhausting political climate and free of inevitably divisive bookings from ANY party affiliations.”

“Subsequently (and rather obviously), a decision was made to, as we say in Hollywood, ‘go in a different direction,’” he wrote, without directly naming Spicer.

Others on Twitter also panned the decision.