Jake Tapper suggests Sean Spicer visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum: 'It's just a few blocks away from the White House'

Jake Tapper's reaction to Sean Spicer's press conference.
(Image credit: Screenshot/Twitter)

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer twisted himself in knots during Tuesday's press briefing, using a historically inaccurate analogy to compare Adolf Hitler's murderous techniques during the Holocaust to the chemical weapons usage of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When asked about the administration's response to the chemical attack in Syria last week that killed dozens of civilians, Spicer remarked, "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons."

When a reporter asked him to clarify his comments, Spicer said that Hitler "was not using gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing." After the briefing, he issued several more clarifying statements, explaining he was "in no way" trying to "lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust," but simply "trying to draw a contrast" between Assad "using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on innocent people" and Hitler's poison gas chambers, which killed more than a million people.

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Kimberly Alters

Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.