Press Secretary Sean Spicer must have done well in drama club since he’s got a flare for acting. At Tuesday’s daily briefing, he used printed-out Tweets as evidence that the media has been mis-reporting news about the Trump White House.
Spicer has raved about Tweets before but in a change of pace, he actually held up a printed copy of a Tweet from Susan Rice, the former Obama Administration’s national security adviser, on how the Trump National Security Council’s Principles Committee had been reformatted to include top Oval Office advisers Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.
The Tweet, “Where’s the CIA?” not only irked Spicer but, apparently, irked Donald Trump himself so much that he wanted answers as to why Rice was Tweeting about internal shakeups.
Ok here is the gif of @PressSec holding up a printed tweet. pic.twitter.com/zxU67neZDu
— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) January 30, 2017
Rice has been public about her concerns over Trump’s national security team, after word leaked Saturday that Trump had given Bannon and Priebus permanent seats on the council, while giving the Director of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the option of attending meetings “when possible.”
The CIA director was not listed in the original memo—hence the Tweet—but Spicer told press on Tuesday that the CIA has not been on the council since 2005, and that Trump was amending his changes to add Mike Pompeo anyway, out of respect for Pompeo’s expertise.
Using a Tweet as a prompt is nothing new to politics, though it is new to the Press Secretary’s daily briefings. Since Trump relies heavily on Twitter to bypass media coverage, it was probably only a matter of time before missives from the social media platform began working their way into the Administration’s daily interactions with reporters.
Spicer may want to take a page out of Bernie Sanders’s handbook next time and put the Tweet on a posterboard. Waving around a Xerox copy is good for effect, but generally hard to read.
