White House press secretary Sean Spicer has had a rough first few days on the job. As The Daily Show host Trevor Noah explained Tuesday night, Spicer delivered what he described as his “first press conference” on Monday.
“Well, he said it was his first, but it wasn’t,” Noah said. “He also came out on Saturday to lie about how many people were at Trump’s inauguration. But let’s agree that it was his first, even though it wasn’t—alternative facts, whatever, we keep it moving.”
While Spicer did appear in the press room on Saturday to berate reporters about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd, he didn’t take any questions. When he returned on Monday, he had some trouble answering even the most basic inquiries from the media.
As an example, Noah pointed to the question Spicer received about the national unemployment rate. Does the Trump administration still believe that it is as high as 42 percent, as Trump once falsely claimed on the campaign trail?
“It’s not just a number to him,” Spicer said of Trump. “He’s not just focused on statistics as much as he is about whether the American people are doing better as a whole.”
“Wait, did he just say unemployment isn’t a number, it’s a feeling?” Noah asked. For an administration so obsessed with crowd size and television ratings, there seem to be some numbers they would prefer to pretend don’t exist.
The “most revealing” part of Spicer’s briefing on Monday, Noah said, was when he took the press the task for their “demoralizing” coverage of President Trump so far. After a year and a half of watching Trump “bully his way to the White House,” the host found it odd that, now that he’s there, all his team can do is “complain about him being bullied.”
