There is no reason to feel sorry for Sean Spicer. He took the job, despite knowing exactly who Donald Trump is. Spicer knew that Trump was pushing a toxic worldview, and he also knew that Trump was a head case who might be a hellish boss. But Spicer took the job anyway, probably in the hopes it would be the stepping stone to bigger and richer things. It looks like he's trying to cash in now, embarking on a speaking circuit amid rumors he's looking into a book and possibly a TV gig.

But despite all that, the masses would like to know how maddeningly stressful life must have been for Spicer inside the White House. In his first big interview since leaving that gig behind, Spicer told Jimmy Kimmel about how he had an alert for every time Trump tweeted (at all hours).

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Quickly, though, empathy vanished. Spicer was jovial here, and occasionally self-deprecating. At moments he showed the kind of self-awareness that seems banned from this White House on a fairly official level. But he also showed off all the ugly habits of the president and people who speak on his behalf. There was the whataboutism, the reactionary media-bashing, the value for loyalty above integrity and competence, and the overarching belief that we can each have our own truth—meaning the president can believe whatever he wants to believe. As we've seen, that's not a recipe for reality-based governance.

Getty Images

The cardinal rule of Trumpworld is that you can never admit a mistake, much less accept responsibility or apologize. When Kimmel asked about Spicer's very first press conference as White House press secretary—when Spicer blatantly lied about the size of the president's Inauguration crowd—Spicer immediately whatabouted to the media. The press, you see, was trying to delegitimize Trump's election, so it was natural for the president to continually lash out and make things up out of thin air about an event we all watched. Never mind that the president himself has continually delegitimized the election, claiming—with no evidence—that anywhere from 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, even constructing a phony Election Integrity Commission to investigate the matter.

Spicer also offered a window into the mental calculus of Trump staffers.

SPICER: Whether or not you agree or not isn't your job. Your job is to give him advice, which is what we would do on a variety of issues, all the time. He would always listen to that advice. [Editor's note: We'll call this claim suspect.] But ultimately, he's the president, and he would say, 'I agree with you,' sometimes...Or somtimes he would say, depending on the issue, 'Look, I know what I believe and this is what I think the right thing to do is'...He's the president, he decides, and that's what you sign up to do.

This is probably true, to some extent, for any presidency. But are we really supposed to believe Spicer's account here, where this president would accept input from a variety of sources, weigh it, and to varying degrees incorporate it into his worldview? Loyalty is the only real currency in this administration—not integrity or criticism.

Accountability is a major problem in the Trump White House. Spicer never admitted to the Inauguration crowd lie, but did express disappointment that the press then asked if he planned to be truthful from the podium, considering he lied in his very first appearance. Whenever Kimmel asked about Trump's escapades, Spicer conjured a media demon that was supposedly equal, or forwarded the notion that everyone—and therefore no one—is to blame for this mess.

"There were times when they were literally creating a story out of whole cloth that didn't exist," Spicer said of the media. Like what? Kimmel didn't press him, but he did press the "fake news" issue.

KIMMEL: But the president, it seems like whatever he calls 'fake news' is anything that criticizes him. And then he'll give validity to wacky news sources sometimes because they're complimentary. Do you think that's a dangerous thing, to delegitimize the press, for America?

SPICER: It's a two-way street. When these guys in the press corps go after the president in ways that are unbecoming...it's sort of like your mom said, two wrongs don't make a right. So when the press corps attacks the president, undermines him, calls into question his credibility—from the outset, it creates a very poor relationship overall.

Again, there were no examples of these outrageous press abuses. Besides, the press calls the president's credibility into question because by some estimates, what he says is false close to 70 percent of the time. They questioned Spicer's because, as he now admits, he'd say anything the president told him to from the podium. Members of the media make mistakes, and credible news outlets issue corrections to the record when they do. That's something that could never be said of the Trump administration or Sean Spicer, who last night told Kimmel this about flawed press reporting:

SPICER: There's never an admission of guilt.

This, from the guy who is still essentially pushing the line that 1.5 million people came to Donald Trump's Inauguration. The whataboutism continued as Kimmel again suggested lumping all press together as fake news was damaging to democracy.

But as someone who's a conservative and a Republican, I've spent 25 years in Washington, D.C., being told 'conservatives want this, Republicans want this.' So I agree. But it's the press corps that also lumps all of us into the same bucket as well, and says, 'conservatives don't care about this. Republicans are racist.'

Again, there are no specific examples of any of this press misconduct. It doesn't seem to matter. In Trumpworld, anything is true if you can get enough people to believe it. Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" did not appear out of nowhere. A little over 30 percent of the country will believe Spicer when he says all this, regardless of the fact he supplies nothing concrete to support it. Therefore, for Spicer—and the president—it's as true as any other account. No version of events is inherently truer, or more accurate, than any other. It's all about what you can sell. That's why they never admit they were wrong, or they lied, or they made a mistake. That's why the only real motto for this White House is, "Double Down."

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.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io