In her impassioned defense of the president, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders falsely claimed Monday that Donald Trump won the overwhelming majority" of votes in the 2016 election. In reality, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes.
Giving her first briefing in weeks, Sanders claimed that the president bore no responsibility for a wave of violence over the past week across the United States. A climate of divisiveness has been blamed for bombs mailed to more than a dozen of Trumps political opponents and critics and a mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
While insisting that the presidents words, which have at times involved personal attacks and conspiracy theories leveled at his opponents and encouraging and celebrating violence at his rallies, had no role to play in the violence, Sanders did not have the same message for the media.
You guys have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when 90 percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative despite the fact that the country is going extremely well, despite the fact that this president is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected. And he was elected by the overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him and wanted to see his policies enacted, Sanders said, incorrectly.
Hes delivered on that, she continued. He's delivered on the promises he's made and if anything I think its sad and divisive the way that every single thing that comes out of the media, 90 percent of what comes out of the medias mouth is negative about this president.
Sanders concluded by saying that the "president has been delivering day-in and day-out" and implored the media to cover those successes. She then abruptly called the briefing to a halt.