Sean Spicer Says ‘Let Down’ Trump With Hitler Remarks
Image by Getty Images
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Wednesday he had let down President Donald Trump with his “inexcusable and reprehensible” comments comparing the use of poison gas by Syria’s president to the atrocities of Adolf Hitler.
“I made a mistake. There’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have and I screwed up,” Spicer said during an event at a museum in Washington. “On both a personal level and a professional level that will definitely go down as not a very good day in my history.”
Spicer triggered an uproar at a White House briefing on Tuesday while discussing chemical weapons use by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying that even Hitler did not use chemical weapons.
On Wednesday, Spicer said the comments were “inexcusable and reprehensible” and all the more painful because they were made at a time sacred to Jews and Christians.
He said it drew attention away from “an unbelievable couple of weeks” of Trump’s presidency.
“It’s disappointing because I think I’ve let the president down,” Spicer said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
