Jason Schwartz is a media reporter at Politico.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is best known to the American public for running the White House daily briefing, a televised performance in which, without so much as raising her voice, the president’s press secretary manages to deflect questions, flatly contradict facts and generally throw wet blankets over the countless fires burning around the administration of Donald Trump. But the most Sandersesque moment yet may be one that happened away from the West Wing, at a little-publicized February event in downtown Washington. She was appearing alongside Mike McCurry, who had held the same position under Bill Clinton, on a panel about the job. McCurry was letting her have it.

“You have got to have an administration that’s committed to respect the role of the free press,” McCurry said. “You cannot have a president who declares them to be the enemy and goes out and describes them as fake news every day.”


Trump has grown to trust and like Sanders, according to multiple accounts from inside the White House, thanks in no small part to her unwavering, relentless advocacy on his behalf. But on this evening, she was not spoiling for a fight. She tried to defuse McCurry with one of her go-to jokes—“I’m used to not always being the most popular person in the room”—and nodded politely while he continued to rail at the administration.

“You cannot do this job in an environment in which you are belligerent and saying you’re at war with these people every day,” McCurry told her.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said anything similar to that,” Sanders replied.

McCurry kept going: Her boss’ war on the media was threatening the glue that holds our democracy together.

Finally, Sanders had had enough. “We have not declared war on the press,” she said. She smiled at the apparent ridiculousness of the idea, and even let out a chuckle.

A murmur spread throughout the small crowd. The event was sponsored by the White House Correspondents’ Association and filled with reporters who had been living through that very war. Her boss had called them the “enemy of the American people” and used Twitter to attack individual journalists by name. For more than a year, he had waged a campaign against the news media more openly hostile than any president in history. And Sanders had been his point person. From her podium, she had promoted the “fake news awards,” accused reporters of “purposefully misleading the American people” and, just a week earlier, claimed that the media was endangering national security by reporting leaked information. Here, in one moment, she hadn’t just dismissed McCurry’s accusation, but conjured an entire alternate reality.

That, according to a former Trump administration official I spoke with, is exactly why the president loves her. “That’s what Trump means, ‘She’s got a great way about her,’” the former official says. “When she says something, it’s totally sincere. It can be crazy, but it’s totally sincere.”

Like much else in the Trump era, the Sarah Huckabee Sanders show is unlike anything Washington has ever seen.

“I don’t really recognize the job anymore,” says Jay Carney, who served as press secretary under President Barack Obama.

“It feels totally different to me,” says Ari Fleischer, who held the post under President George W. Bush.

Olivier Douliery

Most press secretaries have served as hype men for their bosses, arguing a case that, as one former press secretary put it, ideally builds from briefing to briefing, week to week, and year to year. That is not what Sanders does. This administration doesn’t build cases over time; it just tries to survive the day. Amid a constant drumbeat of surprise and scandal, she is there to beat back the press and squelch its enthusiasm.

And she is very, very good at it. Sanders possesses a unique talent that, heretofore, has not quite been considered a talent: She can deaden a room. You almost have to be in the White House briefing room, a claustrophobic space packed tight with reporters and photographers, to appreciate her art. When the bright lights are on and the cameras are snapping and everyone is yelling, “Sarah! Sarah!” with their hands in the air, a palpable electricity flows through it. The moment Sanders unleashes her trademark monotone, the energy drains.

The way several current and former officials put it: Sarah Huckabee Sanders keeps the president from flipping out every day.

Trump is, of course, obsessed with television, and he manages no part of the government as obsessively as he manages his own image on the screen. The anxious, combative performances of his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, tended to raise Trump’s own anxiety levels. But Sanders is different, and she matters right now more than you might think a press secretary could. The way several current and former officials put it: Sanders keeps the president from flipping out every day.

“It’s crucial,” one former administration official says. “Vitally important,” another former official says, adding, “I don’t think she’s replaceable. I don’t think there’s another one out there like her.”

And her role is growing. After communications director and Trump confidante Hope Hicks announced in February that she would be leaving the White House, Sanders was asked to add the communications job to her current duties, according to a White House official and another source familiar with the situation. Sanders stayed put, but she is expected to step into Hicks’ shoes in another sense, taking on some portion of her role advising and supporting a volatile president.

Evan Vucci/AP

The public hasn’t always been kind to Sanders, who gets caricatured as a sour, irritable figure in cartoons and has become a lightning rod for public frustration with the Trump administration’s vexed relationship with facts. But those who have known her for years see a different person: They swear by her as loyal, professional, charming and witty. She manages to keep up with former colleagues spanning years and, in a rare instance of Washington collegiality, remains close with the person whose job she took, Spicer. Some reporters even cop behind the scenes to liking her. So how does that person transform into someone so different during briefings, a kind of denier-in-chief at a critical moment for American democracy?

It all has to do with her relationship with her one-person audience, and what the role of press secretary has become under him. And the secret to that lies in just how she got to the White House in the first place.



***

To truly appreciate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you first must appreciate what the job did to Sean Spicer. A longtime political trench fighter and Republican National Committee veteran, he combusted under the pressure of delivering Trump’s message. The job required him to lie, his answers were picked apart, and he got caught up in the infighting of the early Trump White House. “There used to be a process that everything followed, and I think that rulebook went out the door,” Spicer says. Everything in the Trump White House, he says, was harder. “You pick the variable, it’s times 10.”

Sanders did not come from Washington, or from institutional politics at all—she spent years learning from a very different rulebook. Trump was not the first charismatic, populist conservative she worked for. The other one put her on the job at age 9.

In 1992, her father, Mike Huckabee, ran his first statewide campaign, as a Republican for U.S. Senate from Arkansas. “From the time she was in elementary school, she saw politics up close and personal,” Huckabee says. “She was involved in it, everything from going with me to campaign on weekends and passing out fliers at county fairs.”

The pastor-turned-candidate would hand his daughter $5 and a stack of fliers, and tell her that once all the fliers were gone, she could treat herself to some cotton candy or a ride. That first campaign did not go well, but he came back a year later to win a special election for lieutenant governor, and then the year after that to defend his seat. It marked his third statewide campaign in three years. Sarah was 11. “She was always wanting to be in the room,” Huckabee recalls. “I can remember her standing around the kitchen table listening to Dick Morris explain crosstabs.”

The Family Business Sanders’ formative experience was her father’s 2008 campaign for president, a family-centered endeavor not unlike the one she would join eight years later: the Trump White House. | Al Drago/Redux; Michael Stravato/Redux

Sanders wasn’t shielded from the unpleasant side of the business. “Arkansas politics were pretty brutal,” Huckabee says, recounting the personal attacks he faced in a still-Democratic state that had recently been governed by Bill Clinton. And then, there was the glare of the press. When the teenage Sarah got in a car crash, it made the papers. Huckabee, who would go on to serve as governor for a decade, thought the broadcast media was fair, but, in his view, “the print press in Arkansas were pretty slanted, and for the most part overwhelmingly pro-Democrat.”

As her friend Leslie Rutledge, a former Huckabee staffer who is now Arkansas attorney general, put it, “She lived a press briefing every single day as a child.”

Whatever came, the family rallied around the patriarch, and Sarah walked closely in his footsteps. In high school at Little Rock Central, she joined the mock trial and debate clubs, and was named secretary of the Arkansas Federation of Teenage Republicans. “We chose her because she was capable,” one member said at the time. “It just so happens that she’s also the governor’s daughter.” Then she attended his alma mater, Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and, while there, worked on his 2002 reelection campaign as a field coordinator. That year, spurred on by her dad, she also enlisted as the lead plaintiff in a voting rights case. An area judge had stripped college students of their right to vote in local elections, and Sanders signed on with the ACLU to fight the ruling. They won, freeing hundreds of students on the conservative Christian campus to vote for Mike Huckabee.

In another person, such a record might seem transparently ambitious. But that’s not what Sanders was like, says her former political science professor, Hal Bass. “She was a delight to be with, she was fun. … She smiled, she was witty,” Bass says. “I think you don’t see a lot of that in her public persona now.”

Team Trump Colleagues have described Sanders as “tough” but “relatable.” Below: Sanders with Ivanka Trump at the Winter Olympics; with Hope Hicks; and with Rob Porter and Gary Cohn in the Oval Office. | Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images; Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Sanders’ truly formative experience was her dad’s 2008 campaign for president, a family-centered endeavor not unlike the one Sanders would join eight years later. After working for George W. Bush after college, she returned as her father’s national political director, planting herself in Iowa to lead the campaign’s efforts there. Former Huckabee colleagues remember her willingness to perform any task, pull all-nighters and speak frankly with her father. Through long days and late nights and bull sessions at P.F. Chang’s, she grew close to several staffers, including a volunteer named Bryan Sanders, who would be hired full-time and later become her husband.

During the primaries, Huckabee, the bass guitar-playing former governor who had lost more than 100 pounds and run a marathon, emerged as something of a media darling. But members of the campaign, including his daughter, quickly grew frustrated with the cartoon pastor they believed was being portrayed on TV. “We were the original ‘They’re not treating us fair’ group,” says Chip Saltsman, Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager.

Huckabee surged to an upset win in Iowa, but by March was swamped by John McCain and out of the race. As her dad’s point person in Iowa, though, Sanders had a real win under her belt, something that could have helped punch her ticket in national politics. Instead, she decided to run her dad’s PAC, aimed at supporting candidates who aligned with his views. Sanders would take on other clients: She ran John Boozman’s successful 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate from Arkansas, and briefly worked on Tim Pawlenty’s doomed 2012 run for president. But when her dad decided to throw his hat in the ring for 2016, she signed on as his campaign manager. It gave her a front-row seat to the hurricane about to hit the Republican Party.



***

Mike Huckabee was standing backstage on July 18, 2015, at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, when candidate Donald Trump made his feelings known about John McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”

The former Arkansas governor remembers a Trump staffer standing next to him turning and saying, “Well, I think I may have the shortest tenure of any political consultant.” But Huckabee had a different take. “I was watching and listening to the crowd and how they reacted, and I thought, ‘Mmm, boy,’” Huckabee says.

His daughter’s read was similar. When Huckabee dropped out of the race after pulling only 1.8 percent of the vote in Iowa, Sanders needed a new political home. Surveying the field, she wondered, who had the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton? “Sarah is from Arkansas, you have to remember,” says her husband, Bryan Sanders. “And she’s grown up her whole life with the Clintons.”

“That was the driving force,” he says. “That we have to do everything in our power to defeat Hillary Clinton.”

She liked Trump’s chances, as well as his message, her husband says. “Her dad and Trump were saying a lot of the same things,” Bryan Sanders says. “They were talking about how Washington needs a big change. They were both running very anti-establishment campaigns.”

In other ways, though, Trump could not have been more different from her father. Huckabee is a man of God who raised his children to be deeply Christian; Trump lived like he had a giant Bingo card of sins and was trying to check off every box. Bryan Sanders says his wife’s faith is “the defining aspect of her life,” which actually made Trump more appealing to her. She liked what he was saying about abortion and religious liberty, as well as the types of judges he was promising to appoint, including to the Supreme Court. “It’s not hard to see why evangelicals supported him,” her husband says.

As for Trump’s personal flaws? “Nobody who ever held office is sin-free,” Mike Huckabee says. “Part of it is she understands that the nature of human life is that everyone is a sinner.” To explain, he brings up the German industrialist Oskar Schindler—“a scoundrel, he was really a terrible person”—who also risked his livelihood to save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust. (When I stopped, and asked Huckabee whether he was really making a comparison between Donald Trump and Oskar Schindler, Huckabee said, “No, not necessarily. I mean it could be, but it’s just a bigger principle.”)

On the Job Artwork by Sanders’ children hangs in her office, and a copy of Gone With the Wind sits on a bookshelf. | Evan Vucci/AP

So Sanders signed on with Trump. With her Christian bona fides and steady demeanor, she quickly became one of the campaign’s most reliable surrogates. “When we deployed her, we deployed her under challenging conditions,” says Bryan Lanza, who managed surrogates for the Trump campaign. “She’s a professional operative, and, in this business, and especially in Trumpworld, there were very few of those.”

Trump took notice. “Watching her on TV during the campaign, he was really impressed with her,” Hicks says. Trump would ask Hicks for Sanders’ phone number so he could compliment her performance, or he would instruct Hicks to email her on his behalf. “He would always comment on how unflappable she was, how articulate she was, how insightful she was,” Hicks says, “and just really tough in those sometimes challenging circumstances.”

Two days after the emergence of the famed “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted of grabbing women's genitals, it was Sanders who went on CNN with Jake Tapper to vouch for her candidate. She condemned Trump’s words but said the Christian thing to do would be to accept his apology. “Both of these candidates are flawed,” she told Tapper. “There is no perfect person.” When Tapper pressed her on whether Trump would apologize to any women he had, in fact, grabbed, Sanders executed a perfect Trump campaign parry: “Has Hillary Clinton apologized to the four American lives that were lost in Benghazi?”

In Trumpworld, “Billy Bush weekend” was seen as a dividing line: If you were in, you were really in, and if you were out, it would be impossible to ever truly recover with Trump. Sanders was in.

Officially hired as Spicer’s deputy a day before Trump took office, she received her first chance to brief the press in May 2017, while Spicer was away on Naval Reserve duty. Before that, she had worked only as a political tactician—never in PR—and, watching her early briefings, one former administration official worried that her downhome delivery was not polished enough for Trump. “I was sitting there going, 'Trump’s head has got to be blowing up,'” the former official says. “And he loved it.” Trump just kept saying, “She’s got a way about her,” and “She’s really solid.” He also has said that she is “smart like her father.”

“Tough but relatable, that’s how he has described her to me, and I agree,” White House adviser Kellyanne Conway says.

Over the ensuing weeks, Trump started pushing for Sanders to do more briefings. With speculation over Spicer’s fate running rampant, Sanders and her husband discussed what she would say if Trump were to offer her the job of press secretary. Finally, on July 21, Spicer resigned. At the time, Bryan Sanders and their three children were on vacation with his family at Acadia National Park in Maine; she had cut her vacation short and returned to Washington. He was hiking in the woods with the kids when he got a text. It said, “I’m the next press secretary.”

Sanders immediately brought a sense of order to a press shop that had been under siege, and she dialed down the temperature in the briefing room. One White House reporter assessed the transition from Spicer behind the podium to Sanders like this: “She’s a calm, competent professional. She may lie, but she’s just a lot more unflappable and calm when she’s doing it.”

“She doesn’t seem to have the angst that he had about it,” the reporter added.



***

Sanders has developed a number of signature moves at the podium. She’ll call a question “inappropriate,” or deflect with a joke, sometimes about her kids. She’ll say she doesn’t know an answer and needs to find out, or that she simply hasn’t had the occasion to speak with the president on the matter. Often, she’ll start a briefing late so that it runs short, or bring in another official to kill time. But reporters grow most infuriated when she flatly backs up the president when everyone in the room knows he’s wrong. Behold this exchange from October 10 between Trey Yingst, a reporter for the conservative-friendly One America News, and Sanders:

The Play for Time Reading a letter from a Trump supporter.



The Guest Appearance Full-Body Feint Bringing out another administration official to talk before the briefing begins.



The Joke Jab and Grab “The president was clearly joking.”



The ‘I’-Word Hook “That’s … highly inappropriate.”



The Briefing Bob-and-Weave “I haven’t spoken with him about it, so I’d have to get back to you.”



The Saved by the Bell “Arriving late to the briefing and leaving early for unspecified appointments.” llustrations by Patrick Welsh

YINGST: The president repeated this claim in the Oval Office today, saying we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world. Why does the president keep saying this? It’s not true, overall.

SANDERS: We are the highest-taxed—corporate tax in the developed economy. That’s a fact.

YINGST: But that’s not what the president said.

SANDERS: That’s what he’s talking about. We are the highest corporate-taxed country in the developed economies across the globe.

YINGST: Sarah, so that’s accurate, but the president keeps repeating this claim that we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world.

SANDERS: We are the highest-taxed corporate nation.

YINGST: But that’s not what he said. He said we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world.

SANDERS: The highest-taxed corporate nation. It seems pretty consistent to me. Sorry, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

Some reporters will outright call Sanders a liar. Others are more reluctant to break out the L-word but still become frustrated at the way she regularly obfuscates and bends the truth. Whereas Spicer was known for big blowups, reporters say that with Sanders it feels more like a million small things. “There’s almost sometimes an exhaustion writing the stories of the daily briefing because the number of things she says that are patently false are too many to let your story be weighed down with them,” one White House reporter says.

Here is a highly incomplete list of Sanders’ misadventures with the truth:

August 2, 2017: Said Trump didn’t lie when he claimed the Mexican president called to praise his immigration policies, or when he said leaders from the Boy Scouts of America called to praise a speech he gave at the National Scout Jamboree. (Neither call had occurred.)

November 1, 2017: Said immigrants entering the United States on diversity visas aren’t vetted. (They are.)

November 2, 2017: Denied that Trump called the U.S. justice system “a joke.” (Hours earlier, Trump said of the justice system, “What we have right now, it’s a joke and it’s a laughingstock.”)

February 20, 2018: Said, “The president hasn’t said that Russia didn’t meddle.” (He has.)

March 27, 2018: Said there has been a citizenship question “included in every census since 1965, with the exception of 2010, when it was removed.” (No citizenship question has appeared on the full census form since 1950.)

Sanders declined to comment for this article. But both her husband and father say that any characterization of her as a liar is unfair. “All I know is that Sarah is never going to do anything that violates her conscience,” Bryan Sanders says. “She’s never been asked to do something that violates her conscience.”

By blowing up his credibility live on TV, Spicer appears to have sacrificed the type of juicy book deal or sweet corporate gig that usually greets press secretaries on the other side of the job. But Sanders appears unconcerned with that. Those around her say she has never been one to look ahead, instead always focusing on the job at hand and, as she has since she was 9, loyally fighting for the person she works for.

“Sarah and her father are like Ivanka and her father,” Conway says. “They’re very close, and the daughters came into the family business. There’s a similarity.”

Whatever the cost to her credibility, there’s no question Sanders’ stature in the White House has grown. She has become one of the few people able to actually talk with the president, and even move his position, multiple officials say. They speak before most briefings, and while she can be direct, one senior administration official describes the particularly deft way Sanders has developed of pushing back on Trump. Typically, she does not bluntly disagree with him, but walks him through how the press might react to something. For instance, the official says, if Sanders objects to a strategy Trump has suggested, she might say, “Well, here’s what the follow-up question on that issue is going to be, so how would we answer that?” It’s a tactic that allows her to redirect the president without having to directly tell him he’s wrong.

And she has another skill particularly valuable when working for a boss who doesn’t always operate according to a plan. When issues come up that Trump has not yet addressed, Sanders is adept at channeling his thinking, according to Conway. “Sarah is really deft about speaking for the president on matters [where] he has not yet done so,” she says.

“She gets it. You can’t have these jobs unless you really understand the principal, and she does,” Conway says. “He respects her, and when she disagrees with him or has questions, it’s always phrased in a respectful manner. The tough person you see on TV is the tough person here as well.”

According to Hicks, “Their relationship has gotten a lot stronger since she officially took over the podium.” In addition to their time together in the White House, the president calls Sanders frequently at home.

Sarah and her father are like Ivanka and her father. They’re very close, and the daughters came into the family business. There’s a similarity.”

Behind the scenes, Sanders also has come to enjoy a better reputation than you might imagine with White House reporters. When they go to confirm something with her off-camera, she has a reputation for dealing honestly, typically waving them off inaccurate stories and not pushing back on true ones. Some reporters—especially those from smaller outlets—complain that she ignores them and comes off as contemptuous, but others find her to be accessible and understanding of their role. “It’s different than the show, what you see on TV,” says one, who added that Sanders is often helpful in facilitating logistics.

So how does this person square with the one behind the podium?

In the course of reporting this article, I asked more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues what motivates her. The answer was never one issue. “We didn’t talk a whole lot about policy,” recalls Matt Reisetter, a Huckabee campaign staffer who spent hours with Sanders in Iowa. The picture that emerged is someone driven by the far more elemental force of loyalty.

“She doesn’t consider the president an employer,” says Saltsman, the former Huckabee campaign manager, with whom she remains close. “From her point of view, she’s defending a family member, because that’s how she’s always done it.”

Huckabee agrees. “I think there may be a lot of truth to that,” he says. “She believes her job is to speak for the person who entrusted you.” Speaking for Trump, though, has risks.



***

Before every briefing, Sanders prays and reads from a book of devotions in her office overlooking the White House lawn. Artwork by her children hangs on a board behind her desk, and across the room is a shelf with a few books, including The Christian Life and Character and Gone With the Wind. She’s the first mother to serve in the job, and nearly everyone who deals with her marvels at her ability to balance work and life.

Spicer says one of the biggest challenges of the job is how fluid information can be. “When you work for Trump, put your seat belt on and get ready,” he says. “On a daily basis, you’re trying to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information you have. And the problem is that in a lot of cases, it’s a constantly evolving issue or process.”

Sometimes issues evolve in world-changing ways. Just after 4 p.m. on March 8, Sanders was ensconced inside the office with her top deputies, expecting to be tied up in meetings for the rest of the afternoon. That’s when a staffer burst into her office, telling her that Trump, with Vice President Mike Pence in his wake, had just marched from the Oval Office by her door and was on his way to go speak to the press. Sanders hurried down the hall into the briefing room, where—shocking reporters with his impromptu appearance—Trump said there would be a major announcement at 7 p.m. And then, poof, he was gone.

Olivier Douliery/Abaca

As reporters scrambled to figure out what was going on, Trump’s press officers seemed as clueless as anyone else. Sanders knew Trump had been meeting with a South Korean delegation, and as they walked from the briefing room back to his residence, he explained to her the rest: He had just accepted North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s invitation to meet. This was a sudden, radical change in American policy toward a rogue regime, and it sent the military and State Department scrambling. In the next day’s briefing, Sanders added conditions to the meeting—North Korea had to take concrete steps toward denuclearization—acting as though nothing had changed from the day before. Her newly fabricated reality likely pleased Trump, though the headlines were less kind, focusing on the walk-back.

The Korea episode came on the heels of Sanders’ most difficult stretch in the White House. In early February, reports broke that staff secretary Rob Porter’s ex-wives were accusing him of mental and physical abuse. Sanders was friends with Porter and close with Hicks, whom Porter was then dating. Based on Porter’s denial, Sanders gave the Daily Mail, which broke the story, a statement supporting him.

Then pictures showing Porter’s alleged abuse became public. At that point, the standard PR playbook calls for showing contrition, cutting losses and moving on. But Sanders worked off the Trump playbook, which forbids backing down. She read a statement from Porter at a briefing that referred to the allegations as “a coordinated smear campaign.” She convened a group of four reporters, off the record, to let Porter defend himself in person. Even amid the #MeToo movement, “Early, she gave Rob the benefit of the doubt,” says a person close to the situation.

As the White House fumbled, questions about what the administration knew and when mushroomed into bigger stories about why Porter—and then several others, including Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser—had for so long been allowed to work with interim security clearances.

In a February 12 briefing, Sanders said the White House had learned of the extent of the allegations against Porter just six days earlier, and had accepted his resignation “within 24 hours.” The next day, though, FBI Director Christopher Wray directly contradicted her, testifying under oath to Congress that the White House had been made aware of the allegations multiple times, and months earlier.

Sanders was blistered in the press, and grew frustrated at the breakdown in process around her. “Sarah’s frustration was, you’re sending me out there and I don’t have the answers to all of these questions,” says the person close to the situation. “How can you send me out there to answer all these questions when you have not given me the answers?”

In the next briefing, after Wray’s testimony, Sanders maintained that Wray’s explanation was compatible with hers, arguing the White House personnel security office was not supposed to share information with other West Wing staffers, but her wording was noticeably cautious. Asked whether anyone in the White House personnel security office—which would have received the reports on Porter from the FBI—communicated with anyone in the West Wing about his clearance, Sanders replied, “I’m not aware of any communication. I can’t say definitively, but I’m not aware of any communication.”

The Porter episode wasn’t just a disaster for Sanders, but for Trump himself. The snowballing scandal ended up costing Kushner and several others their security clearances, and derailed the administration’s agenda for weeks. Since then, some reporters have noticed Sanders couching her language more carefully at briefings. Phrases like, “to the best of my knowledge” and “as far as I’m aware” seem more frequent.

Lately, Trump’s impulsive decisions have also seemed to become ever more frequent. In March, after the Washington Post reported that national security adviser H.R. McMaster was on his way out, Sanders denied any problem, tweeting, “Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster - contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.”

A week later, McMaster was gone, and the credibility of Sanders—or anyone who purported to speak for Trump—was questioned anew.

April Ryan, the American Urban Radio Networks correspondent known for her battles with Sanders, believes the job is taking its toll on her. “The stakes are so high, and people are very angry,” Ryan says, noting that Sanders has been the subject of countless attacks, some related to her job, but also many unfair personal ones. “We’ve had conversations about our war wounds,” Ryan says. “Anything negative, after a while, it wears on you.”

How long will Sanders last? Rutledge, the Arkansas attorney general and former Huckabee campaign lawyer, says there’s “always speculation back home in Arkansas whether she would come back and run.” But Bryan Sanders says his wife has no plans to go anywhere anytime soon. “Some days are better than others,” he says, but “she loves her job.”

Outwardly, Sanders has shown only the smallest signs of cracks—the extra “as far as I know” here or “to the best of my knowledge” there. She has remained loyal. “She goes into the White House every day, and she’s focused on the day ahead, doing her job to the very best of her abilities every day. She’s not thinking about what’s next,” her husband says. “I think it’s something that her dad’s always taught her.”