If Hollywood Despised Trump, Sean Spicer Would’ve Been Booed Off Emmy Stage
Instead, he was a huge hit and embraced at the after-party.
Sean Spicer might be a perfectly nice and decent person. I don’t know the man so I’m not going to pretend he’s the Antichrist or malignant to the core.
But Spicer needn’t be either of those things to condemn him for being 100-percent complicit in normalizing President Donald Trump’s shocking-even-for-a-politician behavior. Consequently, it was understandably disappointing for those who bought Hollywood’s “we hate Trump” charade to see many of those same celebrities embrace him at the 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards despite months of cashing in the social currency of Trump revulsion.
So much for the #Resistance, huh?
As a reminder, it was the former White House Press Secretary who echoed—and in so doing, enabled—Trump’s approach of telling outright lies to the American people as well as manifesting hostility toward the press corp. He wasted no time in doing so, either, beginning on Day 2 of the administration with his now-infamous and patently false claims about the size of the crowd attending the Orange Combover’s inauguration.
It only went downhill from there.
Life couldn’t have been pleasant as the butt of a running national joke, but Spicey did it to himself. He tried to cover for his four-Pinocchio inaugural performance with some mealy-mouthed nonsense about how he meant the total audience, including those watching remotely. This was immediately shot down as more deceit since Sean explicitly mentioned specifics related to in-person viewing—floor coverings on the lawn, the press altering images of the inauguration, Washington DC metro ridership statistics, etc.—and because remote viewership numbers are almost impossible to verify or compare.
Next, our boy made the always-wise move of referencing Adolf Hitler during Passover and doing so in a way that reasonable people interpreted as implying the genocidal madman atop the Third Reich was the lesser (!) of two evils when compared to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Spicer tried initially to explain his foot out of his mouth on that one, too, but quickly thought better and simply apologized.
Right up until his resignation in late July, Spicer clashed with the media, lodged no complaint as the White House gradually escalated the conflict and showed zero qualms about carrying Trump’s toxic water while calling it Evian.
The President of the United States might be the Liar-in-Chief, but Sean Spicer was standing right behind that sizable rump, giving it a big ol’ boost.
Furthermore, Spicey knew damn well what to expect when he signed up.
This isn’t a man who wandered in from the wilderness to join Team Trump wearing blinders. Melissa McCarthy’s doppelganger lived all but three years of his adult life as a Republican operative prior to taking the press secretary gig. He spent most of the 1990s working on the campaigns of various GOPers. After that, he moved from one political committee to another representing right-wing interests until securing a position in the George W. Bush administration. Then came his two-year hiatus from direct governmental work, which he spent at a public relations/pseudo-lobbying firm he founded, before returning to spend almost six years as a senior executive for the Republican National Committee. From this last position, he had a bird’s’ eye view of Trump’s rise to power, even lobbing criticisms at him during the early run-up to the primaries.
As a result, it is impossible to argue Spicer didn’t know he was going to work for a political lunatic of the highest order. Yet he went from voicing (mild) concerns over 45's antics to acting like Donald was the only sane person in the room and everyone else was crazy, and he did so without the slightest reluctance.
Nor is Sean apologizing for his role or showing any sort of misgivings about the current POTUS. Indeed, he’s still defending Trump’s approach, still insisting his former boss has gotten a raw deal. Just watch his jocular sit-down with Jimmy Kimmel, which he gave prior to stealing the show at the Emmys.
Apparently, unapologetically enabling Trump, mimicking his behavior and covering for him are all cool if you bend the knee to the Hollywood elite, laugh at their jokes and tell a few of your own.
At least in Hollywood.
Granted, none of this is to say Spicey’s sins were so egregious he should never be able to rehabilitate his image. Nobody is perfect and sometimes career advancement requires rolling around in the mud. Most importantly, not everyone finds Donald Trump irredeemably awful.
It’s just to say anyone who claims to be dead set against the current President of the United States and all he stands for shouldn’t be leading the effort, which is precisely what Hollywood is doing (with an assist from Harvard).
Since Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, the vast majority of Hollywood has been apoplectic.
Ashley Judd compared him to Hitler and rape. Madonna said she thought about blowing up the White House. Hollywood nodded along. Kathy Griffin’s abhorrent publicity stunt involving Trumps’ faux severed head drew little condemnation from Tinsel Town. Johnny Depp implied an actor should assassinate Donald and there was no outcry from his colleagues. Alec Baldwin even defended both Griffin and Depp. Saturday Night Live is suddenly relevant again thanks almost exclusively to the chainsaw it’s been taking to the Trump Administration, particularly Baldwin’s mockery of POTUS and McCarthy’s sendup of Spicer. Stephen Colbert, who hatched the idea of bringing Spicey on the Emmy Stage, has launched a nightly anti-Trump crusade. Other television shows have followed suit.
Yet one of Trump’s top lieutenants resigns and, suddenly, Hollywood comes calling, all smiles and jovial pats on the back.
According to a CNN source, Spicer “could barely eat at the Governor’s Ball, he was so popular.” A representative of The Hollywood Reporter spotted Sean during the Emmys and said he was “posing for pics, drinking beer, soaking up all attention after onstage appearance.”
Of course, none of this should surprise anyone.
Hollywood’s A-listers never really cared about Donald Trump. At least not about the lasting damage his policy’s might inflict. None of that will have even tangential impact on their gilded, insular lives behind security details, tinted windows and gated fences. Nah, their antipathy arose from his rejection of their specialness and import through explicitly disavowing any interest in their support and implicitly by defeating Hillary Clinton, a candidate to whom they flocked and who returned their adulation in kind. Eventually, they saw Trump criticism was fashionable and got them attention so it became The Thing To Do.
Such superficial motivation isn’t enduring, though. Fads pass. The same act gets stale, the shock effect wears off, eyeballs wander and new material is needed to bring them back. If that means a knife in the back of people you once pretended to support, so be it.
Sean Spicer’s Hollywood rehabilitation tour is all the proof you need.
