If former Apprentice star Donald Trump’s presidency can be understood, roughly, through the tropes and clichés of reality TV, Sean Spicer was the classic goat.
That is to say, if Spicer, who resigned his post as White House press secretary Friday, were on Survivor or Big Brother, he’d be the sort of contestant whose presence in the competition is good news for everyone else. If you’re a reality-TV contestant, you want to bring a goat as deep into the game as you can before cutting them loose; unschooled in strategy, they’ll vote how you tell them, and they’re always an easy boot. Simple ineptitude is too quotidian for the goat; such players seem (in part due to savvy editing) to be almost confused as to the rules of the game.
Spicer, who, when he spoke on camera, did so live, can’t blame the editors. But the format—early in Trump’s presidency, a daily briefing that came to be must-watch TV for a certain class of news consumer—was certainly not his friend. As a character in the daily drama of Trumpland, Spicer managed to make banality stand out; in snug suits that seemed to grip his body like a vise and with his face flushing the pink of uncooked pork, the press liaison rose to levels of dudgeon over petty offenses. As a TV figure, he radiated a nasty sort of anticharisma—call it camera-unreadiness, perhaps—that gave watching him, for his detractors, a nasty, vicarious thrill. In contrast to the zenned-out sangfroid of administration figures like Kellyanne Conway and Ivanka Trump, Spicer seemed to pulsate off the screen. It was electric, strange, and watchable—precisely the things that candidate Trump, having stepped back from daily TV appearances during his presidency, had once been.
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