Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was Jimmy Kimmel's main guest Wednesday night, and the crowd welcomed him warmly. "If I'd known I would get that kind of applause, I would have left earlier," Spicer joked, referring either to his adversarial job with the media or the unpopularity of his former boss. Kimmel said that White House press secretary is a hard job, but in this case it was also "kind of funny in a lot of ways," and Spicer jumped in: "For you! I'm not so sure I see it that way." He explained how President Trump tapped him for the job, and laughed uncomfortably as Kimmel reminded him of his first outing, lying about Trump's inaugural crowd size.
Spicer said in order to understand Trump's crowd-size fixation, you have to understand that people in the Trump camp felt they were battling constant attempts, "in the media in particular," to "undermine the validity" of Trump's win. "But the validity of the election compared to looking a photos of the crowd at an inauguration?" Kimmel said, asking Spicer if he tried to talk Trump "out of that line of defense." Spicer said it's the press secretary's job to "represent the president's voice" and articulate "what he believes" on policy and "other areas that he wants to articulate," and "whether or not you agree or not isn't your job." So "then you have to march out there and go, 'Yeah, he had a bigger crowd, everybody,'" Kimmel said. "Look," Spicer said, "as I said, he's the president, he decides, and that's what you sign up to do."
Kimmel turned to Spicer's relationship with the press, serendipitously playing a clip of Spicer promising Jonathan Karl, a longtime acquaintance, that he would never knowingly say something that wasn't true from the White House podium. Spicer gave a brief discourse on reaching different conclusions with the same facts, and said it hurt when reporters questioned his integrity on Day 1. "Yeah, well, I'm sure, though when you brought that crowd size thing out, you opened this terrible Pandora's Box," Kimmel said. Spicer said it was his job to be Trump's voice, never really explaining how that's different than Twitter. Watch below. Peter Weber
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