Nearly every day, he fields questions from a press starving for input, clarification and explanation about the nation’s 45th president, whom both devotees and detractors will admit is a president unlike any other.
Trump is a news machine, which puts Spicer on a daily pedestal. He has fielded questions on front-page fodder that has run the gamut from whether former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump’s phones to the Republican alternative to Obamacare to links between Trump’s cabinets and aides and Russia.
“People tune in to see an implosion or explosion,” said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.
“It’s the same reason that people watch YouTube videos of car crashes,” said Jeff Sadosky, a GOP media strategist who has worked for Sens. Mike DeWine and Rob Portman.
Still, in just under three months, regulars to the briefings say that Spicer has largely evolved from the combative press secretary in the ill-fitting suit who lambasted the press one day after the inauguration for their crowd estimates to one who’s a little more even-tempered, though with occasional flashes of peevishness.
“He’s changed his style,” said George Condon of the National Journal, a veteran D.C. reporter and native of Cleveland. “The first week he almost never called on the mainstream reporters. He went out of the way not to call on AP, Reuters, the networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post. When he did call on them, it was curt answers, He hardly ever took follow ups.”
Now, he said, Spicer has settled in, is calling on reporters from a variety of outlets, and “he’s not as openly hostile.”
There are still flash points. When Spicer recently held an off-camera briefing that excluded a handful of major outlets, it became national news. Still, Condon said, Spicer has solicited advice from former press secretaries and used it.
“You find your style,” he said, acknowledging Spicer “started out in an unfortunate way.”
Sadosky said a good press secretary serves two masters: Their boss and the press. Alienate one, and you lose your job. Alienate the other, and you lose your credibility.
Spicer faces an additional hurdle, Sadosky said. Most press secretaries work to reflect their bosses’ message, serving to drive them home to the press. But message discipline is harder with Trump, whose love of Twitter means Spicer’s “best laid plans can be blown up with 140 simple characters.”
If McCarthy’s mockery of Spicer didn’t make him a star, national interest in all things Trump did. His initial televised briefings beat soap operas such as “General Hospital” and “The Bold and the Beautiful” on network television in ratings, according to Nielsen data, delivering an average of 4.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
The contrast to the end of the Obama administration was stark, but then, there’s little news appeal in a lame duck presidency when you compare it to Trump World, where a 6 a.m. tweet can define the news cycle. There’s a crowd in the briefing room starting a half hour before the briefing begins; by the time Spicer begins reading his canned notes, the room is standing room only, with more people standing than there are in those coveted blue seats.
The mood is alternately jovial and combative; the scolding he offered on the first day when the White House disputed crowd estimates for the inauguration has been muted in favor of gentler tones.
And sometimes the mood is even convivial.
On one recent off-camera gaggle, Spicer fielded a question about whether he’d get ashes on his forehead for Ash Wednesday.
“I will be going to get my ashes in a little bit,” Spicer assured the reporter. “I’ll let my mom know you appreciate that.”
During that same briefing, Spicer joked that the assembled reporters need to give up asking two questions per person for Lent. “Or at least I need to give up answering two questions,” he cracked.
A few days later, during another off-camera briefing, he accused a reporter of trying to showboat when they interrupted an answer.
“You’re not on camera,” he chided. “You don’t need to jump in.”
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