8 tricks for defending Trump

When your boss lives on cortisol and caprice, enduring him can be a siege. But when you’re expected to make sense of him, translate his bellows into sentences and sand down his manic edges without abrading his tender rosacea, you’ve got a recipe for workplace madness. Charged with publicly covering for President Donald Trump — whenever he tweets, say, that President Obama tapped his phones or millions of people voted illegally — Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka and other dauntless White House aides end up fighting to stay cogent on cable news. It’s no wonder. They have to steer between twin perils: contradicting their boss at the risk of infuriating him, or embarrassing themselves by double-speaking and jive-talking. Most opt for the jive. During this long national opening act of Trump’s presidency, they are finding a range of ways — from klutzy to inspired — to thread this needle. Here is a short primer on their favorite rhetorical moves.

1. The he-believes-it shuffle

When defending a particular indefensible Trump statement, this trick involves noting that it doesn’t matter whether “gullible” is in the dictionary; what matters is only that the president believes it’s not. On Sunday, for instance, the White House trotted out press aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders to answer to her boss’ wacko claim that Obama had wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower — a whoa-if-true allegation that top national security officials and Republican members of Congress easily refuted. “Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Sanders told Martha Raddatz. The veteran ABC host was having none of this. Trump had not advanced a hypothesis in his tweet, she pointed out; he had flatly declared the wiretapping a fact. “I don’t think he’s tweeting out classified information,” Sanders insisted. “He’s talking about ‘Could this have happened? Did this happen?’” Raddatz countered: “He’s saying it did happen.” Exasperated, she finally snapped, “You’re his spokesperson!”

2. The Kellyanne escape asana

White House aide Kellyanne Conway’s half-hour workout on February 8 with Jake Tapper featured seriously yogic truth-stretching. But she showed off her best contortion when the CNN anchor pressed her on the president’s repeated exaggeration of the nationwide murder rate. She fluidly braided two techniques into one, starting with self-pity — she was “soldiering on” despite media attacks — and then chastising the media for neglecting Trump’s many virtues. “I can’t imagine anybody disagrees with President Trump when he says, if we don’t take care of our veterans, who are we really as a nation?” she asked. Tapper didn’t bite, chiding her, “That’s not addressing what I just talked about.” But even when he got Conway to admit that Trump hadn’t always told the truth to the American people, she managed to lower the bar, asking, of the presidential lies: “Are they more important than the many things that he says that are true that are making a difference in people’s lives?”

3. The spicey nitpick

Press secretary Sean Spicer is a master at quarreling with trivia in media reports while ignoring their graver import. The Spicey Nitpick was first and most memorably deployed when the New York Times ran a spellbinding and deeply sourced story about Trump’s difficulty learning the White House ropes, which included the news that he had unknowingly granted his chief strategist Steve Bannon access to top-level national security meetings. Rather than disputing the report, which suggested dangerous incompetence in the White House, Spicer dismissed the whole Times story as “fake news,” before homing in on one nugget: “I don’t think the president owns a bathrobe, or definitely doesn’t wear one.” It took about a Twitter second for photos of Trump in bathrobes to saturate social media. But Spicer was undeterred, and he used the same technique to swat down a Times story about Trump’s bitter relationship with the media. In this instance, the nit he picked was an error about his own place of birth — Long Island, it seems — even though Spicer hadn’t replied to a request for comment by reporter Glenn Thrush. The Times issued an extraordinary correction that noted, “Mr. Spicer would not go on the record and give the correct facts about his birthplace.”

4. Trumpal infallibility

With this one, proof of anything is that Trump said it, and Trump’s word is incontrovertible. When Sebastian Gorka, a White House national security aide, was asked for the administration’s view of Islam, he went fundamentalist: “You can read the president’s word.” Similarly, Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, asserted his boss’ supreme and unimpeachable authority when asked for evidence of the imaginary voter fraud that Trump has repeatedly alleged. “It is a fact, and you will not deny it,” he told a stunned George Stephanopoulos. “I’m prepared to go on any show, anywhere, any time and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct, 100 percent.”

5. “George … ”

With this move, a surrogate uses an interviewer’s name to convey exasperation and condescension, as if to say, How many times do we have to go through this? Miller used this technique to satisfying effect in his flabbergastic Stephanopoulos interview, blending it with repeated declarations of Trumpal infallibility. “Did the North Korean missile test cross President Trump’s red line?” Stephanopoulos asked. “George,” said Miller, wearily, as if talking to a slow child. “The president’s comments on this” — no comments were cited — “are clear.” By which he meant: The comments aren’t clear, they don’t exist and I won’t clarify them, George.

6. I know you are, but what am I?

This is a classic of the Trump campaign, alive and well with the administration. After national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned for fibbing to the vice president about his calls with the Russian ambassador, amid widespread calls for a deeper investigation into Trump’s Kremlin ties, POTUS proposed some enterprise journalism of his own, tweeting, “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington.” That was definitively not the real story, but no matter: Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a key Trump ally, quickly popped up to finger the real bad guys — not the lying Flynn, but those who exposed his deceit. As Nunes put it: “The big problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded.” That one cleverly anticipated Trump’s latest Twitter spasm by several weeks, so it was little surprise when Nunes promptly agreed on Saturday to investigate not the president whose odd affinity for Vladimir Putin has made even Republicans queasy, but — yup — Barack Obama.

7. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Republican members of Congress perhaps have the toughest task in answering for Trump when they go on TV, because many of them spent the campaign trashing him openly. Take House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, who famously said he couldn’t look his wife and daughter in the eye if he voted for Trump. (He voted for Trump.) In a recent cable hit, Chaffetz declared that his committee was not going to look further into Flynn’s sketchy contacts with the Russian officials because it’s “taking care of itself.” This evocation of ethics as a self-cleaning oven is vivid if implausible, but the line builds nicely on “move on,” another of Trump’s surrogates’ favorite sleights-of-hand. When Conway was asked why Flynn had stayed at his post even while Trump knew he could be blackmailed by the Russians, she answered, “We’re moving on.” And the morning after Flynn resigned, Representative Chris Collins, a Trump ally in Congress, made moving on sound heroic: “We move on from here. I’m not going to be one — nor would I hope others would dwell on the situation. … I just live in a world where I always move forward. … You don’t dwell on the past.” (If only the media weren’t all about dwelling. As CNN’s Chris Cuomo shot back, “There is zero chance that we’re going to move on.”)

8. This is very fluid

This is an extremely cerebral post-doc move, and one that should be attempted only by its inventor: Kellyanne Conway. Though a lifelong Republican and presumably familiar with conservatives’ resistance to moral relativism, Conway often invokes a rarefied, deconstructionist philosophy that puts truth in the eyes of the beholder. When Matt Lauer asked Conway about how the president continued to employ Flynn when he had been told his national security adviser was blackmailable, she waxed positively Derridian. “You’re presuming that all the information you have there is completely factual and who knew what, when, and this is very fluid,” she said. Asked again about Flynn’s vulnerability to blackmail, she replied, “That’s one characterization.” Fluid alternative facts that can be subjectively characterized, but no hard truths. Heady stuff.

Virginia Heffernan is the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.