Reporters should just stop going to White House press briefings. It is not an opportunity to be informed of administration policy or intent—the president may just as easily turn the whole ship around an hour later. It's not truly an opportunity to hold the administration accountable—when faced with a tough question, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders almost always reads from a script or says she'll talk to someone about that or that she straight-up can't answer. At times, she has refused to answer questions about her own previous statements.

And mostly, there's just a complete disdain for the role of a free press in a democratic society. Instead, it is a performative exercise in bashing the media to please the president, who is almost always watching.

That was fully manifest Thursday, when CNN's Jim Acosta asked Sanders to declare in front of the watching world that the free press is not, as her boss has repeatedly yelled from the presidential podium, "the enemy of the people." She refused, choosing instead to list her own problems:

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Sarah Sanders had a full self-pitying meltdown and refused when asked to state that the press is not the enemy of the people. https://t.co/yU21qXfNli pic.twitter.com/OevQU5eqKn — Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 2, 2018

There will be endless debate about Michelle Wolf's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner—which every year features a comedian that takes shots at the administration—but the record should be straight on one thing: a restaurant in Virginia refused to serve Sanders because of her actions as a public official, as is their right. She was quietly asked to leave, and it only became an issue when Sanders tweeted about it—and, knowing exactly what she was doing, named the restaurant. (The Red Hen, and other restaurants of the same name, have subsequently gotten death threats.) That is entirely different from being attacked in some way, or characterized by the world's most powerful man as an enemy of the state.

The idea "the media" is the real force, as Sanders suggested, in "lowering the level of conversation in this country" is absurd. It is grotesque. The president spends most of his mornings tweeting grammatically challenged insanity—many bits of which now constitute blatant attempts to interfere in the Russia probe—and more and more of his nights yelling from the podium at a rally. This is a 72-year-old man who tweets "WITCH HUNT" in all caps as a form of argument in official presidential communication. He crafts playground nicknames for political opponents and calls primarily black and brown countries "shitholes." He suggested some people who march alongside Nazis are "very fine people."

Joe Raedle Getty Images

He is among modern history's most prodigious liars, a man who fundamentally does not subscribe to the concept of truth. According to The Washington Post, he made 4,229 false claims in his first 558 days in office. The truth, to Donald Trump, is whatever enough people will believe, so that he will quite literally say anything. The result is that "the media" must spend much of its time correcting the record and calling out his falsehoods, many of which are used to justify dangerous public policy. This is not an "attack" on the president, it's the fundamental role of the press.

Alex Wong Getty Images

That disregard for the truth is shared by his staff, including Sanders. When this issue came up in yesterday's briefing, she held out half an olive branch and then slammed the media for its supposed role in sabotaging surveillance operations of Osama bin Laden in 1998. This was not true, yet she used it anyway to undermine the role of the free press in a democracy. This is straight out of her boss' playbook, and it was quickly dismantled by the free press. But how many people will only have seen Sanders' false claim? That's in addition to her other contributions to Raising the Level of Our Discourse, which includes putting out official White House statements referring to a lawfully conducted federal investigation as a "witch hunt."

The fact of the matter is that Sanders is an agent of a regime whose leader seeks to build an authoritarian movement to run roughshod over the institutions of democracy, and subverting the concept of truth is crucial to that effort. Sanders, in turn, is crucial to that, and wages continual war on the press, an institution of democracy protected under the First Amendment. The Obama administration had its problems with respect to press freedom, but this is of an entirely different kind. It is sweeping and pernicious. It will, as more and more people have warned in recent days, eventually get dangerous.

Sanders should not be attacked, and Acosta did not suggest she was an enemy of the people. What he and his colleagues ought to do is stop covering these macabre imitations of democratic self-government.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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