In defense of Sarah Huckabee Sanders

In the media's treatment of the White House press secretary, there's an element of unambiguous class hatred

Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

It would take a heart of stone not to pity Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary whose sorry lot it is to defend with clarity and rigor the extraordinary, the bizarre, the deeply misguided, the hilarious, the moronic, the wicked, and all the other words that could be enlisted uselessly in an unsuccessful attempt to describe the things President Trump does and says on a daily basis.

Like her very unlucky predecessor Sean Spicer, Sanders has become a hate figure for journalists. Half of this is mere self-righteousness. It is almost impossible to describe for those who have never attended a briefing in the West Wing what a smarmy, self-congratulatory, clubbish, childish, idiotic set the White House press corps are. These are people who think that their needling questions about the half-understood minutiae being fed to them by colleagues via their cellphones are of vital importance to the national interest and that asking them makes them indispensable guardians of peace and justice without whom our democracy would wither away.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.