White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told a press briefing today: “You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” as part of a larger statement in which he was arguing that Russia and Assad supporters were even worse than Adolph Hitler.
The media point man for the president— any president– cannot afford to be so uninformed. He called Assad
“Ashad” at one point, and demonstrated a true ignorance of basic world history when he said Hitler– who was responsible for killing millions of Jews and Gypsies and gay people in Nazi gas chambers– never used chemical weapons.
Worse yet, his horribly insensitive comments came on the first day of Passover, the Jewish commemoration of their departure from the long years of slavery in Egypt.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi immediately called for Trump to fire Spicer and “disavow his spokesman’s statements.”
Spicer’s insensitivity to the Jewish Holocaust also showed itself earlier this year. In January, when a few people criticized the administration’s failure to mention Jews in a statement observing International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Spicer called the criticism “pathetic.”
“To suggest that remembering the Holocaust and acknowledging all of the people — Jewish, Gypsies, priests, disabled, gays and lesbians — it is pathetic that people are picking on a statement,” he said.
“Spicer is running out of usefulness,” said Kevin Seraaj, a minister and journalist in Orlando, Florida. “His days are probably already numbered. Trump is pretty sensitive to media criticism right now and Spicer is becoming more and more of a liability. How do you talk about the Holocaust and not somehow mention the Jews? That’s pretty much like discussing slavery without talking about the slaves.”
