POOR Sean Spicer. It’s no wonder he turned up for work wearing odd shoes, one black and the other brown. Being press spokesman to Donald Trump must be like having to plug your mouth into a mad person’s brain. Getting dressed in the usual order must be the last thing on your mind in the morning.
Whatever crazy things your boss says, it is your job to justify or interpret them for the world. Of the many barmy notions that Trump has rattled out on Twitter in the small hours, his belief that former president Barack Obama wiretapped him during the election campaign is the most persistent.
On March 4, Trump tweeted: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Spicer has offered various interpretations of his boss’s mad mutterings, including telling the press that it was all their fault for taking the president’s tweets at face value. And that Trump put quotation marks around the word ‘wiretapped’ – “to mean broadly surveillance and other activities”.
The nuances of punctuation are not what normally pops into the mind when reading Trump’s tweets. Instead it is possible to worry that the most powerful man in the world either has a hinge missing; or that he is playing with smoke and mirrors in his own mad scheme to disparage everyone and everything ‘non-Donald’. By carrying on in this way, he reduces the world to his own mad logic and gives self-credence to his bizarre version of events.
This wiretapping allegation from the dusty corners of the Trump brain has so far been denied by everyone, from Obama’s spokesman to the Republication and Democrat intelligence chiefs of in the Senate.
Now this mad tale has taken another twist, after Andrew Napolitano, a judicial analyst on Fox News, claimed that three intelligence sources confirmed to him that the Obama administration used Britain’s GCHQ to spy on Trump so that there would be “no American fingerprints on this”.
The normally Trappist GCHQ broke its customary silence and dusted off a spokesman to say: “Recent allegations made by media commentator judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”
How tempting it is to take that further and say that Trump is himself utterly ridiculous and should be ignored – or, at the very least, his tweets should be. His ‘wiretapping’ tweets included calling Obama a “bad (or sick) guy”. US officials said his allegations were ‘groundless’.
As Trump is so madly inventive in his tweets, I think we should all join in his game by making up Trump tweets. Here is my suggestion to get things rolling: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my brain tapped shortly before the greatest victory. Ever. Nothing found. Just a soggy piece of stilton cheese.”
As for Sean Spicer’s footwear, you know you’re losing it when you turn up for work in mismatched shoes. Socks I can understand, but shoes? Having to be the spokesman for Trump’s stilton brain must be taking its toll on the poor man.