'MIXED BAG'

Even Trump’s Ex-Spokesman Can’t Spin His Disastrous Speech

The president’s onetime press secretary had some notes on his bizarre address.

President Donald Trump’s much-hyped speech on Thursday night fell short even for his own former spokesperson.

Sean Spicer, who was Trump’s press secretary for just six months in 2017, said the substance of the president’s bizarre speech on election integrity was “solid”—but lacked other crucial information.

In his 25-minute speech, Trump cried fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. He declared that “great damage has been done to our country” by nefarious foreign actors and that U.S. elections have been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”

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The administration later released a trove of declassified intelligence documents to back up his claims, but much of the information appears to be old and has so far failed to substantiate many of the president’s more serious claims.

“Were you surprised that he didn’t come forward with more evidence last night, Sean?” NewsNation anchor Markie Martin asked Spicer on Friday’s Morning in America.

“Yeah, a little,” he responded, saying the White House webpage containing the supposed evidence was “clunky.”

“This is something that, when you’re gonna make an accusation and bring up a concern as heavy as that, it should have been laid out a lot easier for the American people to see,” he said. “I think it fell short in that aspect of it, because I was eagerly trying to find out this information and look for it.”

But that doesn’t mean Spicer thinks that Trump’s claims were unfounded.

“That’s why I said the substance was solid. I think the president addressed a concern that’s fundamental to our country, to make sure that you know that there’s integrity on that. The delivery and the style is where I think it fell short,” he said.

The comments are a stark departure from Spicer’s eyebrow-raising defenses of the president in the past. In 2017, he claimed that Trump’s oath-taking drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” even as aerial footage and ratings showed that 7 million fewer Americans tuned in than at Barack Obama’s swearing-in.

As for how other Republicans received the president’s speech, Spicer speculated that the feedback from conservatives was likely a “mixed bag.”

“It was a good issue. It’s very, very big on the right, very big in the MAGA movement,” he said, before adding, “I think where he fell short was giving more steps.”

“We need to have more of a call to action, more of a to-do list,” he continued. “I think when you tell someone that there’s a major problem, we need to have a solution. We need to have a path forward. I don’t know that he gave a lot of people that, aside from just saying, ‘Pass the SAVE Act.’”

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Trump has repeatedly demanded that lawmakers pass the SAVE Act, a controversial legislation that would require proof of citizenship to vote in U.S. elections. But he has so far been unsuccessful, resorting to retaliation by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill in protest.

“Even on that front, we’ve been doing and talking about that on the right for a while,” Spicer said. “We need a more concrete path of how to do it.”

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