President-elect Trump’s penchant for using Twitter to criticize lawmakers, bully companies and take swipes at other nations could make his top spokesman’s job unusually difficult, according to outgoing White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
“It will be a challenge,” Earnest, who conducted his last press briefing a day earlier, told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Wednesday morning.
Trump has selected former Republican National Committee chief strategist Sean Spicer to serve as press secretary for his administration — a position that will come with its own set of challenges given the incoming president’s Twitter habits. Spicer has previously said he sometimes learns about tweets his boss has sent once they’ve been posted and seen by millions of people.
“That has the potential to put Mr. Spicer in a difficult situation,” Earnest said, adding that an inconsistency between Trump and Spicer’s response to any given situation could negatively impact “sensitive policy issues [and] policies that have bearing on our national security and our relationships with countries around the world.”
“The two most important responsibilities for the president’s spokesman are to be factual and to accurately reflect in as much detail as possible the thinking and perspective of the president of the United States,” he added.
Spicer has previously said that Trump “drive[s] the news” with his tweets and so the president-elect’s Twitter feed is the first place he looks.
