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Sarah Sanders to Resign as White House Press Secretary
Posted
June 13, 2019
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June 13, 2019
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4:01Now PlayingWhite House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving the Trump administration after a turbulent tenure marked by attacks on the media, dissemination of false information and the near-disappearance of the daily press briefing.
“Our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas,” President Donald Trump said Thursday in a tweet.
Speaking at a White House event later Thursday, Sanders said it was the “honor of a lifetime” to serve in the Trump administration. “I’ve loved every minute -- even the hard minutes,” she said.
Sanders, 36, took over the role as top White House spokeswoman after her predecessor, Sean Spicer, abruptly resigned in July 2017. The president did not immediately name a replacement press secretary.
While Sanders proved a more effective and composed carrier of President Donald Trump’s message than Spicer, she maintained the administration’s publicly antagonistic approach to reporters and regularly ran afoul of the facts.
In April, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed that Sanders had conceded that her insistence at a press briefing that she had heard from "countless" former and current FBI agents that they no longer had faith in fired director Jim Comey was a "slip of the tongue" made "in the heat of the moment."
Sanders also disappeared largely from the public eye in recent months, holding only two of the once-daily White House press briefings since the beginning of 2019. Trump explained her absence in a January tweet saying that she no longer briefed reporters because “the press covers her so rudely.”
“I told her not to bother, the word gets out anyway,” Trump wrote.
Instead, Sanders would occasionally book appearances on Fox News and hold brief question-and-answer sessions with reporters on the driveway of the White House. But while the press secretary spent less and less time with reporters, her influence grew within the West Wing, where she was a trusted confidante of the president who was regularly consulted as Trump crafted messaging strategy. She’s also among the longest tenured of an inner circle that has experienced record turnover among senior staff.
Several other press and communications officials have recently left the White House, where the president’s mercurial nature has often made it difficult to speak with authority on his behalf. Deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters left the administration in early April, and Raj Shah, another deputy press secretary, left after overseeing communications for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.
Trump acknowledged that tension in a May 2017 tweet: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!”
Sanders, an Arkansas native, often took Trump’s combative approach into the White House media briefing room. While she frequently sidestepped substantive policy questions, she regularly came to briefings with prepared remarks lambasting reporters and their coverage of the president.
“Repeatedly the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger,” Sanders said on Aug. 2, during a heated exchange over Trump’s repeated references to the media as “the enemy of the people.”
“The media continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the President and everyone in this administration,” she said.
Sanders often found herself defending Trump’s most incendiary remarks and actions, a balancing act that occasionally led her astray of the facts.
In response to a question about whether Trump had used a racial epithet in the past, Sanders said in August she couldn’t guarantee that he hadn’t, then proceeded to state falsely that Trump had created three times as many jobs for black Americans as President Barack Obama. She later corrected the error in a tweet.
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