The fallout from last week’s departure of Sean Spicer as White House press secretary and Reince Priebus as chairman of the Republican National Committee spilled into MSNBC’s liberal programming on Sunday. Our friends at Mediaite found that one-time weekday host Thomas Roberts -- now a weekend host -- made a harsh assertion about Spicer’s future during an edition of MSNBC Live.
“What hypocrites any broadcast network will be if they hire him,” the fill-in anchor stated after a discussion about what Spicer will do “with his newfound free time."
It all began when Roberts pointed to the “deep ties” Priebus and Spicer have with Republicans in Washington, D.C., including their efforts to groom “a lot of these officials to get there.”
With the two leaders “gone, is the establishment kind of training wheels of a Spicer and a Priebus off the Trump bus, to get anything done that we expected them to do?” the anchor asked. “What’s going to happen now with General John Kelly that doesn’t have these deep policy ties?”
The answer came from former Republican Congressman David Jolly (Fl.), who stated that Kelly has ties to Capitol Hill since he was a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and a liaison to many people there.
“To your point,” Jolly continued: “Listen, this is Donald Trump pushing away the establishment; he embraced them briefly.”
He also noted:
I would also say that if you look at Priebus and you look at Spicer, and we know they had impossible jobs, but they didn’t do it. They were bad at their jobs.
Priebus did not get a legislative agenda done even though Donald Trump stood in his way every step of the way. Spicer became a lampoon on Saturday Night Live. They were the JV (Junior Varsity team).
Instead, “General John Kelly is varsity; he is the all-pro; he is the Peyton Manning” (the very successful and popular quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts National Football League team), Jolly claimed.
“What to look for going forward is this: The final fate of John Kelly ultimately will be the litmus test for Donald Trump’s seriousness to govern,” the Republican panelist continued. “If he does not listen to the likes of John Kelly, then we are really done with this administration.”
“This is the last, best hope for Donald Trump: a serious state general like John Kelly,” Jolly concluded.
Roberts responded: “Well, if they did have a plan for the honeymoon period of the first six months, Priebus and Spicer could have been the pawns, and now with the general coming in, we could see things shake up.”
“I just want to say we did all this reporting and reading about Spicer taking jobs or, you know, the next jobs and interviews around town," the host continued, "what hypocrites any broadcast network will be if they hire him."
As NewsBusters previously reported, Spicer blasted the press while a guest on May 1's CBS This Morning:
We go up there every day armed with a set of facts we have, and sometimes it becomes a game of gotcha, which is someone comes in and says: "Well, I know this instead."
If that's the game, it's who can stump the chump, then that's not really an exercise in trying to get to the bottom of a situation.
Of course, Spicer was often hammered by liberals, including Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball program, who called any of his news conferences a “clown show” and claimed on Tuesday, June 20, that the rumors of his “imminent demise for months was like Generalissimo Franco,” the Spanish dictator who was the target of ongoing jokes in the early days of NBC’s Saturday Night Live program.
On the following day, Spicer returned fire during an interview with Republican radio host Laura Ingraham when he lambasted the opposition party that he faces at the Briefing Room podium as wannabe “YouTube stars” thirsting for “getting their clip on air” tussling with Spicer.
However, not long after Spicer resigned on Friday, July 21, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta broke the news by calling the network’s Inside Politics program and stating that Spicer “was raked over the coals publicly” on Saturday Night Live while reporters hammered him constantly.
In addition, the editors at The New York Times took advantage of Spicer’s departure to post a fiery op-ed article. Their outright written attack on the former press secretary left nothing to the imagination for their contempt of him, noting that he was “not loved by reporters” because he banned live audio and video recordings by news outlets from press briefings.
While the future of Reince Preibus wasn’t discussed during Monday’s MSNBC segment, it undoubtedly won’t be long before he also comes under attack from the “tolerant” liberals in the mainstream media.
