In a briefing to the White House press corps yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a string of statements on the DHS shutdown, the war on Iran, and other issues that, according to Jonathan V. Last and Andrew Egger at the Bulwark, suggest that she “thinks we’re all idiots.”
Speaking about the ongoing airport disruptions caused by the congressional standoff over DHS funding, which has resulted in TSA agents working unpaid for over 40 days, Leavitt declared that “the cruelty is the point,” accusing the Democrats of intentionally wanting to inflict pain on the public.
Her use of the “cruelty” phrase is interesting for two reasons, says the Bulwark. First, because the term was originally coined to describe how President Donald Trump’s policies are designed to inflict pain, spanning examples like the cuts to USAID, ICE enforcement at schools, shooting citizens in the streets, and sending people to “gulags” in El Salvador.
And second, because her assertions contradict the statements made by Trump and other Republicans.
“The bizarre split screen of Karoline Leavitt still trying to carry out the administration’s line that this is all the Democrats’ fault,” says the Bulwark, “has been pretty substantially undercut by many things the president himself has been saying, and other Republicans are saying. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have reached a deal to reopen all of the parts of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE, which would get TSA back to work. They keep saying this, saying we’ve got it, we just need the president to buy in. And the president — he keeps going out in public and saying that deal won’t work.”
Leavitt’s “split” extended to the war on Iran. On one hand, she bragged about American military supremacy, but on the other, according to the Bulwark, “This was their PR strategy all along. Don’t look at the economic consequences. Don’t look at the Strait of Hormuz or the price of oil or anything. Just look at these fun little sizzle reel videos of our guys drone striking things.”
This approach is failing.
“The bottom has fallen out of their support,” noted the Bulwark. “They’re shedding members of their coalition left and right.”
In the past, Leavitt and the rest of the administration frequently used a tone of contempt for the press to rile up supporters, but that has begun to fall on deaf ears.
“It’s obvious that they have no plan to extract themselves from this conflict, and yet there’s no other playbook in terms of messaging to the press,” says the Bulwark. “You could imagine a different White House that would acknowledge that there are some real American concerns about how the negotiations are going. The price of oil is berserk. We were not in great economic straits before, but right now it’s looking really, really bad for everybody all over the place. We’re embroiled in a Middle Eastern war that nobody signed up for, that Congress never voted to authorize.”
Yet despite these concerns, Leavitt continues to have a “how dare you” approach to questioning, dismissing outrage over the cost of gas, for example, by using doublespeak terms like “temporary short-term fluctuation in gas prices.”
But according to the Bulwark, Americans won’t buy it: “There’s no way to spin gas. What did we learn from Biden? You can’t spin your way out of it. The number on the pump goes up and you suffer politically. Any way they slice it, they are really cooked on this stuff.”