The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website October 31, 2017:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded on Oct. 31 to White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly calling Robert E. Lee “an honorable man.” (Reuters)
“Look: All of our leaders have flaws,” Sanders began, reading from notes. “Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy. That doesn’t diminish their contributions to our country. It certainly can’t erase them from our history. And General Kelly was simply making the point that just because history isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not our history.” Continue reading “Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s defense of John Kelly’s Confederacy comments makes no sense”
The following article by Jim Tankersley was posted on the Washington Post website October 30, 2017:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers remarks to the press on October 30, 2017, inside the James S. Brady Briefing Room. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
On Monday, as news about the indictment of President Trump’s former campaign manager dominated the headlines, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, took to the podium to tell a story about journalists, bar tabs and discount beer.
The story, told at the White House press briefing, was meant to illustrate the realities of America’s progressive tax system. Instead, Ms. Sanders’ tale appears to conflict with another story that President Trump likes to tell: the one about how he’s not interested in cutting taxes for the rich.
Earlier this month, in a meeting with members of the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Trump repeated his oft-told anecdote of a chat he had with his good friend Robert Kraft, the wealthy owner of the New England Patriots, in which Mr. Kraft implored him to cut taxes for the middle class but not the rich. Mr. Trump agreed with that notion, Democrats who attended the meeting said, and declared that his coming tax bill would be focused on the middle class and not on rich people like Mr. Trump. Continue reading “A White House Story Reveals Shifting Stance on Tax Cuts for the Rich”
The following article by Callum Borchers was posted on the Washington Post website October 24, 2017:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Oct. 24 that the decision by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to not seek reelection in 2018 is “probably a good move.” (Reuters)
It is not really accurate to say that the White House responded on Tuesday to the harsh criticisms leveled against President Trump by retiring Republican Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.). During an afternoon media briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t even attempt to engage with the substance of what either man said.
Instead, she offered a retort that can be summarized like this: Trump is a winner. Corker and Flake are losers.
The following article by Chris Sosa was posted on the AlterNet website October 22, 2017:
During an appearance on ABC’s This Week, retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus told host Martha Raddatz that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was wrong when she said that criticizing “four-star Marine general” John Kelly was “inappropriate.”
The following article by John Wagner was posted on the Washington Post website October 20, 2017:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Oct. 20 defended Chief of Staff John F. Kelly’s attacks on Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) and called it “highly inappropriate” to debate with “a four-star Marine general.” (Reuters)
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told a reporter Friday that it would be “highly inappropriate” to get into a debate with “a four-star Marine general” over whether he misstated facts.
The following article by Emily C. Singer was posted on the Mic website September 13, 2017:
Former President Barack Obama worked with members of the GOP, including John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, on many occasions. Credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lauded President Donald Trump from the White House briefing room Wednesday, saying Trump had done “more for bipartisanship in eight days than [former President Barack] Obama did in eight years.”
“I can’t think of any time when [Obama] made a deal with anyone from the opposing party,” Sanders said, seeking to defend Trump’s decision to negotiate with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on a three-month extension of the debt ceiling.
Maybe Sanders just has a bad memory, however, because Obama made a number of bipartisan deals throughout his presidency.
Those deals were necessary for the Democratic commander-in-chief, who faced a Republican-controlled House for six years of his tenure and a GOP-controlled Senate for the final two.
In 2010, Obama worked with then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on an extension of Bush-era tax cuts and unemployment benefits, along with other tax changes.
Three years later, Obama again worked with McConnell to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which would have triggered a tax increase on Americans earning less than $250,000 a year as well as strict budget reductions.
Obama also reached out to congressional Republicans on other occasions, including during the health care debate back in 2010.
Obama even went so far as to travel to a House Republican retreat in Baltimore that same year, where he spent an hour answering questions about his health care bill.
Trump’s negotiations with Democrats, as well as his dealmaking with Schumer and Pelosi, is nothing new — and Sanders’ assertion that Obama never made any gestures to Republicans is false.
The following article by Yamiche Alcindo and Glenn Thrush was posted on the New York Times website September 13, 2017:
Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, spoke with reporters at the Capitol after meeting with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, delivered a pointed history lesson on America’s 300-year legacy of racism to President Trump on Wednesday in response to what he called Mr. Trump’s “sterile” response to the riots in Charlottesville, Va., last month.
The president invited Mr. Scott, a conservative from South Carolina who had expressed disgust with Mr. Trump’s equivocal reaction to the white supremacist protests that left one woman dead, to the Oval Office for what Mr. Trump’s staff described as a demonstration of the president’s commitment to “positive race relations.” Both men described the interaction as positive and constructive, but Mr. Scott clearly had a point to make.
The following article by Paul Farhi was posted on the Washington Post website August 26, 2017:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders pauses to listen to a reporter’s question during the daily news briefing at the White House in Washington on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2017. (Carolyn Kaster/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
It’s a stock response of every White House press secretary who’s either caught off guard or is trying to dodge a sticky question. When a reporter asks a tough question during a briefing, the reply from the podium is often a punt: “I’ll get back to you on that.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trump’s press secretary, invoked some version of IGBTYOT 10 times on Thursday , which may be a record for a single briefing, if records for such things were kept. Among other topics, she vowed to get back to reporters after they asked questions about: foreign aid to Egypt; the president’s ban on transgender members of the military; the arrest of a Russian dissident; the possibility of a presidential pardon for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; the job status of the Internal Revenue Service commissioner; and the White House’s reaction to federal approval of Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
The following article was posted on the trumpaccountable.org website June 28, 2017:
During a testy exchange yesterday at the first on-camera White House press briefing in a week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was challenged by a reporter who accused her of “inflaming everybody right here right now.” Brian Karem, editor of the Montgomery County Sentinel called out Sanders for her response to a question about the firing of three CNN employees for a retracted story that did not meet CNN’s journalistic standards. Karem’s frustration and complaint was that there are consequences in the real world of journalism for shoddy work that does not meet ethical standards while the world of the White House Press Office has no similar consequences or standards.
The press secretary clearly wants to talk about the successes and stories that reflect what the Trump administration is working on. It should not be surprising, however, that the media wants to talk about other stories. This is the fundamental challenge in any communications shop and no PR workshop or textbook encourages a communications director to scold media outlets for pursuing unflattering stories. The most skilled communications professionals are able to expertly advance the narratives they want emphasized while downplaying the narratives they don’t want on the front page. Continue reading “Inflaming Fake News”
The following article by Kristine Phillips was posted on the Washington Post website June 28, 2017:
Brian Karem, the reporter who confronted deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders during a news briefing, said he did so because he’s had enough of the Trump administration’s bullying of the media.
“I don’t like bullies and I don’t like the entire situation of the press and free speech being castigated for no other reason than we either get stories wrong — which happens, and it should be then responsibly corrected — or because we report news the president doesn’t like — which seems to happen even more often than getting stories wrong,” Karem, executive editor of two Maryland newspapers, wrote in a column explaining his outburst during the Tuesday briefing. Continue reading “‘I don’t like bullies’: Reporter explains why he confronted Sarah Huckabee Sanders”
