On Monday, at a White House press briefing, Sean Spicer surprised an audience of reporters who must by now have grown accustomed, even hardened, to the press secretary’s gaffes, mistakes and dogged defenses of alternative facts. Extemporizing on Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against a civilian population, Spicer explained why the Syrian dictator is more evil than Hitler.

“Someone as despicable as Hitler … didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” Spicer told the crowd. Asked to clarify his remark by journalists presumably aware of the Nazis’ use of Zyklon B, first in the euthanasia program and later in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, the press secretary compounded his mistake.

“He was not using gas on his own people the way that Assad is doing” he added, thus betraying his ignorance of the fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews, gay people, political opponents and people with disabilities exterminated by Hitler were German and Austrian citizens.

It’s difficult to believe that anyone could go on to make the situation worse, but Spicer rose to the challenge. Unlike Assad, who “dropped (poison gas) … into the middle of towns” Hitler, said Spicer, had the weapons sent “into the Holocaust center”. One can hardly imagine what he was envisioning when he described the concentration and extermination camps as “the Holocaust center”.

This is not the first time that the White House has displayed a curious unwillingness to deal with the Nazis’ final solution to the Jewish question. Soon after his inauguration, on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Donald Trump issued a statement of sympathy that neglected to mention the Jews.

Called to account, Sean Spicer dismissed the resulting outrage as the grumbling of “nitpickers”. Sensitivity on these issues is understandably high, given the rising incidence of antisemitism and hate crimes of all sorts, as well as Trump’s (possibly waning) closeness to Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart news is a wellspring of bigotry and propaganda.

Despite one more ineffective attempt to make things right (“Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”) Spicer’s combination of callousness and historical amnesia inspired a range of critics – from Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi to Steven Goldstein, director of the Anne Frank Center – to demand that he be fired. But this seems unlikely to happen, in part because Spicer’s behavior so closely mimics that of his boss.

Like Trump, Spicer will never take real accountability for his actions. And more to the point, like Trump, he can be counted on to make statements that a bewildered nation proceeds to parse and analyze, trying to understand: was it the product of ignorance, stupidity, unconsciousness – or some Machiavellian plan?

Anyone who has ever watched Sean Spicer fending off the panic of a C-minus student busted for not having done his homework might have trouble believing him capable of complex, duplicitous machinations.

But like so many of his colleagues in the Trump administration, Spicer has shown us how unconsciousness and stupidity can, however paradoxically, assume a Machiavellian function – how a flagrant example of gross insensitivity and flat-out odiousness can serve as yet another useful and convenient distraction.

For another day or so, we will fixate on the fact that Sean Spicer appears to know less than nothing about the horrors of second world war, that he and many of his colleagues employ the immoral rhetoric and willed ignorance of Holocaust deniers.

And this short-lived fixation will move the conversation away from the administrations’s chaotic (or nonexistent) foreign policy, away from Trump’s impulsive vengeance undertaken on behalf of the very same “beautiful babies” he has prevented from entering our country.

Spicer’s reference to “the Holocaust center” will resurface the next time he and his cohorts demonstrate their indifference to the history of Jewish suffering and to suffering in general.

But for now we can only admire his gift for distracting us – and how good a job Spicer is doing at playing the reality show contestant to whom the entire audience can feel superior. His boss has managed to persuade at least some Americans of his independence from Putin, Assad’s champion. And Spicer has diverted our attention away from the question of how he did that.

Decrying or mocking Spicer’s massive faux pas, we can stop thinking about the damage being done to our environment and our schools, about the mass deportations of hard-working immigrants, about the ongoing war that Trump is waging against his poor and working-class supporters, about the ways in which our democracy is being undermined, every minute, every hour.

Perhaps what’s most disturbing about Spicer’s remarks is the idea of the scandal – long-lasting, at once destructive and informative – that would likely have ensued if something similar had occurred under more recent administrations.

But so many distressing and horrifying incidents have occurred since Trump took office that our attention span has come to resemble his. The White House press secretary forgets or ignores or denies the Holocaust – and it’s just another day in Trump’s America.