5/12/18
The White House probably thinks it cannot punish Kelly Sadler for her awful comment about John McCain because President Trump has also said nasty things about McCain. It may worry that showing her the door would set a troubling precedent for a president who may one day cross a very similar line. Welcome to the ongoing degradation of our political discourse. Destination: No end in sight. It is worth recording just where we are when key thresholds are crossed. What happened this week is worse than most anything we have seen — worse even, I would argue, than Trump questioning McCain's war hero status. What's more, the White House is trying to simply brush it under the rug, which means the bulldozer is pressing forward. Sadler reportedly said of McCain's opposition to Gina Haspel's nomination to be CIA director, “It doesn't matter; he's dying anyway.” The White House's response Friday was not to distance itself from the comment about the brain cancer-stricken Arizona senator, but to no-comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Sadler is still employed but declined to go any further. “I’m not going to validate a leak one way or another out of an internal staff meeting,” she said.
The comment, as it happens, was first reported Thursday just hours after a Fox Business Network pundit suggested McCain had given up key information while being tortured as a prisoner of war — a claim for which the network soon apologized. But while Trump's favorite cable news company was quick to atone for merely airing someone else's view that crossed a line, the White House is apparently not going to take any public action for a staffer talking blithely about the death of an American war hero. Mostly, though, this all shows how unlikely the trend is to arrest itself any time soon. Either because the White House is afraid of setting a standard Trump cannot meet or because Trump is demanding it hold the line against the media's outrage cycle, it is serving notice there are more important things than Sadler's public accountability: things like confidentiality and politics. The White House's position on this kind of situation has always come down to not giving an inch. The upshot of that approach is an environment in which employees feel okay joking about death — and in which another comment will surely readjust the bounds of our rhetoric even more to the extreme.
