A jovial Sean Spicer made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday night following the release of his new book, The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President. Kimmel interviewed the former White House press secretary about “adjusting to life on the outside,” keeping in touch with Donald Trump, and his new podcast, Everything’s Going to Be All Right. The amicable chat was starkly different from the scathing reviews The Briefing has received so far.
Rather than taking Spicer to task for the many lies and false claims Spicer helped spread during his time as press secretary, Kimmel asked whether Trump tweets from the toilet or wears cologne. When Kimmel did get to the credibility issue, he asked about Spicer’s mother and her thoughts on Trump. “Did she ever say, ‘Go in there and tell that son-of-a-bitch Trump to stop making you lie’?” Kimmel asked. It wasn’t the first time in the interview that he allowed Spicer to scapegoat Trump for his own deceptions. When asked if he always maintained “credibility and the truth,” Spicer replied, “I think there were times that I went out and expressed what the president believed or a view that he had that people didn’t agree with, or they were saying that that was not true, and they would blame me for the fact that I was communicating a view or a belief that he had.”
Kimmel’s main comment on Spicer’s book was that it is “not a tell-all, but a tell-some book.” He also shared Trump’s tweet of support with the audience:
“Now, there’s no chance he read this book, right?” Kimmel asked Spicer. While Spicer admitted that Trump, who is not known as a reader of books (or indeed much other than flattery about himself), probably “skipped” it, Spicer did tell Kimmel that he was kept in the loop during the writing and editing process.
