Noticing a sudden lack in invitations to make cringey jokes about his penchant for lying while riding around on a mobile White House press podium in front of America’s rich and famous, former press secretary Sean Spicer has found a new way to squander his dwindling, Anthony Scaramucci-level relevance in the political spotlight:
He wrote a really bad book.
From the glaringly bland title, “The Briefing,” to the fifth grade-level prose, to the abundance of factual errors that even a mini-fridge that decided to pursue a career in proofreading could catch, the critics agree: the novel is about as disastrous as his White House lawn party casual-wear, as cataclysmic as his rage-filled first press briefing, as ignominious as the fact that the requisite, post-White House job offer from Fox News never arrived.
According to reviews of “The Briefing,” his most striking errors are elementary. He fumbles the decade during which President Trump’s predecessor served as commander-in-chief, describing a reporter asking Obama a question in … 1999. He refers to Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier that makes salacious claims about President Trump’s fetishes, as Michael Steele, who is actually the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Spicer also attempts to rewrite history throughout the volume, omitting publicly accepted facts about key, well-documented scandals in Washington. While journaling about working for former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), he lavishes his old boss with dull praise. “[He] knew how to manage the news cycle. And on top of that, he was good to staff and fun to be around,” he writes, conveniently forgetting to mention that Foley resigned over his habit of sexting teenage boys who worked in the congressional page program.
Despite being the press secretary during the epically tumultuous eight days between Trump firing FBI director James Comey and the appointment of a special counsel, Spicer also completely ignores key details of the story that formed the basis of the “witch-hunt” thorn in the President’s side: that Trump asked James Comey for “loyalty”; that Trump asked Comey to leave Michael Flynn alone; and that Trump, in the Oval Office, told Russian officials he didn’t need to sweat about the probe with Comey gone.
And a Spicey novel wouldn’t be complete without mention of his former boss’ most beloved punching bag: Hillary Clinton. And her emails.
“Imagine if any one of us had illegally copied classified information and placed it on the computer of a sex offender,” he writes. “How many special prosecutors would that entail? It is this kind of double standard that stokes Donald Trump’s ire and erupts in his tweets and statements.”
Aside from the actual content of the Spicer tell-all, the rollout of the new memoir has been shaky, making the public relations nightmare that unfolded after he dove into an actual shrubbery to avoid talking to reporters, look like child’s play.
— During a promotional interview on NBC’s “Today” last week, Spicer, a full grown man, literally giggled about his reputation of lying to the press.
— A book-signing event at a warehouse store in Massachusetts was cancelled due to the “political climate.”
— He was called a “garbage person” who wrote a “garbage book” by a protester at a New York City Barnes and Noble. The protestor also craftily hit Spicer where it hurts by mocking the crowd size at the event: “I hope you look around and you see all these empty seats!”
For writing a book so riddled with lies that even Stephen Colbert couldn’t justify making it the butt of a chummy joke — that would inevitably suffer an Emmy-level flop — Sean Spicer is our Duke of the Week.
