The face of the White House press operation has already undergone several iterations, with each embodying the administration in their own special way. First was Sean Spicer, who exemplified the administration’s comfort with telling bald lies and being openly hostile toward the news media. Then came Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, who was Donald Trump’s vulgarity incarnate. Now we have Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose style as press secretary is less shrill than Spicer, and less pelvic-thrusting bravado à la The Mooch. But that’s what makes her the most insidious of them all.

Sanders made numerous appearances at the podium as deputy press secretary, but she was pushed front and center in July when Spicer quit in protest of Scaramucci’s appointment as communications director, and really came into her own after Scaramucci left the White House in a blaze of profanity-laced glory. (Hope Hicks, Trump’s longtime flack, was formally named Scaramucci’s replacement this week.) Sanders is the first mother to serve as the White House press secretary. She is also the daughter of former Arkansas Governor and bad joke-teller Mike Huckabee. As a devout evangelical, Sanders reads from a book of Christian devotionals prior to every press briefing, according to The New York Times.

Where Spicer sputtered and The Mooch sleazed, Sanders is more in line with what you would expect of a professional press relations person. She is a little muted, a little dead-eyed, yes, but she is also less aggressive, less condescending, less startlingly terrible. She speaks in a slow and deliberate southern accent, often gracing her speech with rueful smiles. But in essence, Sanders is the same as her predecessors. She lies. She thinks her job is to discredit the news media, not to answer the public’s questions. Above all, she provides cover for her racist, despotic boss.

The world was reminded of this fact on Wednesday, when Sanders said ESPN should fire Jemele Hill, a black female reporter, for calling Trump a “white supremacist” and “bigot” on Twitter. Sanders told reporters, “I think that’s one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make, and certainly something that I think is a fireable offense by ESPN.” It was a Trumpian mix of chilling authoritarianism, racial grievance, and personal vendetta that was delivered by Sanders with stony calm.

WH Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says Jemele Hill's tweets calling Trump a white supremacist were "outrageous" and a "fireable offense." pic.twitter.com/dpsLWAb5Pv — JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) September 13, 2017

But compared to her predecessors, Sanders has flown quietly under the radar. She has not been immortalized by Melissa McCarthy. She has not engaged in a painful, snowballing gaffe about Adolf Hitler not using chemical weapons in the Holocaust. She has not called up a reporter for The New Yorker to accuse her colleagues of cock-blocking. And she is not so obviously a shrieking propaganda mouthpiece, as Spicer was. On his first day of the job, he loudly declared that Trump had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period.” In that moment, Spicer made clear just what the Trump administration thought about the truth—perhaps too clear.

