Spicer's tenure: Short but memorable By the end, he had largely disappeared from public view.

Exactly six months after his first briefing at the White House podium, press secretary Sean Spicer is out.

His tenure was brief, but it was perhaps the most memorable of any press secretary in the position’s long history. Never before has a White House spokesman gained such cultural prominence, his briefings deemed such a spectacle that cable networks carried them live, late night shows replayed clips with regularity and Saturday Night Live made him a recurring character.


Many Americans could not pick Ari Fleischer or Jay Carney — press secretaries under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively — out of a lineup. But Spicer was widely recognized outside the confines of the West Wing, sometimes with unpleasant results.

By the end, though, he had largely disappeared from public view, replaced at daily off-camera briefings by principal deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders.

His credibility was suspect. He regularly made factually inaccurate statements and defended the often evidence-free claims of his boss. Most famously, perhaps, was his declaration that the crowd at Trump’s inaugural was the largest in history — “period.” But there were many other assertions that undermined his reputation. He insisted the administration’s travel ban was “not a ban,” though the president himself had referred to it as such. He claimed, without evidence, that fired acting attorney general Sally Yates was a major Hillary Clinton supporter.

While freely brushing aside his own untruths, Spicer regularly seized on any mistakes made by the news media to deride reporters as dishonest and interested in pushing their own agendas.

He didn't help his own cause by making frequent verbal gaffes, butchering prominent names like that of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. He falsely stated that Adolf Hitler did not use poison gas on his own people, and referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers” (he later apologized for those remarks). He once stepped to the podium with his American flag pin turned upside down. And on the night FBI Director James Comey was fired, Spicer famously huddled with staff among bushes — not “in,” the White House will forever argue — to avoid questioning reporters.

He suffered other indignities: Spicer, for example, was not one of a handful of staffers Trump brought along to meet Pope Francis in the Vatican, despite Spicer being a devout Catholic.

The White House press corps did not much have a high degree of respect for Spicer. He berated reporters regularly, both to their faces and behind their backs. He called one reporter an “idiot” and a “cheap Page Six reporter,” and planted a false story about another in a right-wing publication. And that was just his relationship with POLITICO.

Across media circles, there was little sympathy for Spicer when the resignation finally came.

“At the beginning, Spicer seemed like a Shakespearean figure who prompted swells of both empathy and anger,” said one reporter who regularly attended Spicer’s briefings. “Reporters felt bad for him, trying to serve an impossible master. But by the end, the general feeling was one of good riddance. He almost always behaved like a child. Resigning may be the first adult thing he’s done in months.”

“Sean's briefings could be more confusing and confounding than informative. Often, he'd talk himself in knots, and we'd all have to seek clarity after he wrapped the briefings,” said another briefing room regular. “But without question, the many questionable statements he made from the podium were troubling and bewildering. That will be his legacy. And it's not a particularly positive one, for the office of the presidency or the country.”

Even if he didn't answer them directly, Spicer did not seek to evade the hard questions. He would regularly call on reporters whom he knew would pose difficult queries — from CNN’s Jim Acosta to the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush and NBC’s Hallie Jackson — and would often get into heated confrontations, voices on both sides rising. It was often this drama that kept viewers coming back.

Many reporters and observers, as combative as they could be with Spicer, quietly voiced sympathy for his plight as spokesman for a demanding and mercurial president.

Spicer appeared to grow more comfortable behind the podium as time went on, smiling more often and laughing at his own jokes. And he even came to laugh at himself, gamely joking about the SNL routine and proudly citing a POLITICO article about his use of the word “phenomenal.”

While his colleagues enjoyed the SNL routine, his boss did not: Trump was particularly irked that Spicer was played by a woman, the comedian Melissa McCarthy.

Spicer did not seem quite as irritated. Soon after McCarthy-as-Spicer doused a reporter with a water gun mid-briefing, a super-soaker gun was spotted in Spicer’s office. It appeared to be unused.