Gaslighting can be redefined as Sarah Sanders in the future-that's a "Sarah Sanders."
"Sarah Sanders was the disdainful Queen of Gaslighting"
By Margaret Sullivan June 14, 2019
"When Sarah Sanders said Thursday that she hopes to be remembered for her transparency and honesty, the first impulse was to laugh.
But lying to citizens while being paid by them really isn’t all that funny."
". . . report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III: “Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from ‘countless members of the FBI’ was a ‘slip of the tongue.’ . . . She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment’ that was not founded on anything.”
"Utterly unfounded, but insisted on as if it were carved on tablets, and don’t you dare doubt it. That is a pretty good description of gaslighting.
And gaslighting was a Sanders specialty, day in and day out. (After a while, of course, that became week in and week out, then month in and month out, and finally, not at all, as the once-daily briefings were phased out. The last one was more than 90 days ago.)
“Sanders failed at all aspects of the job,” Joe Lockhart, press secretary for President Bill Clinton, told me Thursday.
Lockhart elaborated: “She didn’t keep the public informed, including canceling the briefings, she was not honest, according to her own testimony to the special counsel, and she stood by and allowed the normalization of labeling the press the enemy of the people.”
In August, CNN’s Jim Acosta challenged Sanders publicly on Trump’s disparagement of the press.
“It would be a good thing if you were to state right here, at this briefing, that the press — the people who are gathered in this room right now, doing their jobs every day . . . are not the enemy of the people,” Acosta said. “I think we deserve that.”
Sanders refused, deflecting to say that she had suffered media criticism, putting her in danger. At other times, she parroted the president with more destructive language: Some media people were not enemies of the people — only the “fake news” types. (In Trump World, fake news is almost always coverage that reflects poorly on the president.)
And always, with Sanders, the sneering denials of the obvious:
In late 2017, for instance, Trump called Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) “a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”
Asked in the briefing about what sounded, in that tweet, a lot like sexual innuendo, Sanders went straight to gaslighting, telling the reporter, “Your mind is in the gutter.”"
Sarah says, claims to be Christian? She's a liar and supports Trump, so she is a hypocrite. I HATE HYPOCRITE CHRISTINAS MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THIS WORLD!
"Sarah Huckabee Sanders Wants You to Know She Was Not Impressed"
She surveyed the media landscape and decided that truth was what she said it was.
By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens 18 June 2019
Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every other week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/opinion/sarah-sanders-trump.html
"Bret: Worse is always possible in this administration. But Sanders set a benchmark for awfulness that was a thing to behold. It wasn’t simply that she spun the news or shaded the truth, which many people in her position have been known to do. It wasn’t even that she lied, though she did that with abandon.
It was that sneer of hers, the consciously curled lip, which seemed practiced before a mirror, that communicated bottomless contempt for individual journalists, for the profession of journalism itself and for the very idea of truth-as-such. She combined the sincerity of Elmer Gantry with the moral outlook of Raskolnikov. And there will be future spokesmen who will model themselves accordingly.
Then again, I sometimes felt that some of the White House correspondents made it easier for her with their own showboating. I often fear that the Trump administration has a way of bringing out the worst in us journalists — our self-importance, our belief that we are in sole possession of the truth, our habits of editorializing when we (pundits excluded) should be trying to tell the news straight.
