Will Trump’s next press secretary be a better liar than the first five?

As Karoline Leavitt prepares to step down from her role as Donald Trump’s fifth White House press secretary, a brief review of her tenure, and that of her predecessors, makes clear that the most fabulist president in US history prizes one quality above all else in the women and men who speak for him: a willingness to tell outrageous lies.Leavitt started her tenure by telling a wild falsehood at her very first news conference, when she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza. Later the same day, The Guardian reported that the claim was directly contradicted by USAID records.Sean SpicerSean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, also told perhaps his most blatant lie the first time he stepped behind the podium in the White House briefing room.The day after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Spicer summoned reporters to the briefing room and relentlessly scolded them for not reporting the lie that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe”. Visual evidence made it clear that this was untrue.Sarah Huckabee SandersFour months later, his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted to reporters that FBI agents were privately delighted that Trump had fired James Comey, then the FBI director.Asked by a reporter what she had based that on, Sanders replied: “I can speak to my own personal experience, I’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision.”Sanders later admitted to the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, an investigation Comey had started, that she had invented this claim. According to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report: “Sanders acknowledged to investigators that her comments were not founded on anything.”Stephanie GrishamStephanie Grisham, whose nine-month tenure as press secretary was marked by her notable failure to hold even one formal press briefing, admitted in her memoir that she had lied for Trump, but she never acknowledged that her biggest lie was told before she even took up the role.In 2018, when she still worked for Melania Trump, the president’s wife, Grisham insisted, in the face of concrete evidence to the contrary, that Trump was telling the truth when he claimed that he “predicted” the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum the day before the vote during a visit to Scotland.In fact, as dozens of journalists on that trip confirmed, Trump had actually arrived in Scotland the morning after the vote, when the result was clear. Still Grisham doubled and tripled down on the lie to defend Trump’s claim, which he went on to make again and again in the following years.Kayleigh McEnanyKayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth press secretary, routinely lied for the president throughout the Covid pandemic in 2020, but perhaps never more blatantly than when she was asked, at a June briefing that year, why the president kept using the racist term “kung flu” to refer to the coronavirus, which had emerged in China.“The president doesn’t,” McEnany claimed, two days after he had clearly used that term at a rally in Oklahoma. “What the president does do,” she continued, “is point to the fact that the origin of the virus is China. It’s a fair thing to point out.”The very next day, Trump used the racist term again, to great acclaim from his supporters, at a Turning Point USA rally in an Arizona megachurch.