Don't Let Sean Spicer Tap-Dance Out of Infamy on 'Dancing With the Stars'

On one level, I suppose, you could say that being cast on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” is punishment enough. It is not generally a sign of a thriving career. You don’t have to be a scandal subject or a public joke or an “Oh yeah, it’s that guy” to get cast on the show, but it doesn’t hurt.

All of which may be reason to ignore the fact that “Dancing” has cast former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, heretofore best known for tap-dancing to his boss’s tune and waltzing past the photographic evidence to insist that President Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest of all time, period.

Certainly I’m giving the show precisely what it wanted when it cast Spicer, which is publicity. And I’m probably giving Spicer what he wants, which is attention as he takes one more step toward an imagined life in which he’s no longer a buffoon, where people shrug off his mendacity and say: “Hey, what was he supposed to do? Everybody’s gotta keep the boss happy, right?”

Besides which, it isn’t cool to get mad about things like this. It’s so strident. It’s so earnest. If you high-mindedly wrestle with a goofy sideshow like “Dancing With the Stars,” you just get glitter all over you, and the show gets ratings.

But this is one time when we should get uptight. “Dancing With the Stars” is just a silly, innocuous reality show, that’s true. And that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be helping Spicer dry-clean his reputation.

I’m not saying there’s nothing funny about Spicer. There’s always something funny about incompetent deception. Melissa McCarthy, playing him as the administration’s hapless Baghdad Bob on “Saturday Night Live,” made him hilarious.

Since he resigned from his job in 2017, Spicer has tried to use the jokes as a giant whoopee cushion to land on, bounce back from and move on to some undetermined, respectable future. At that year’s Emmys, he showed up behind a moving podium, playing McCarthy playing him.

He’s tried, not much more artfully than he spun in the press room, to walk a line between sort of apologizing for his behavior as press secretary and sort of remaining a defender of the administration for which he set his credibility on fire. His 2018 book, “The Briefing,” neither an apology nor tell-all nor loyalist defense, was not well-received.

Enter “Dancing With the Stars” to present him as a good sport who can laugh at himself, who is out there willing to try some dance moves and maybe look silly and hey, can’t we all just let bygones be bygones?

Now, look: It’s not as if reality shows cast only paragons of honesty. But this is not simply a matter of Sean Spicer’s having lied. It’s a matter of Sean Spicer’s being a liar, professionally.

That is, he’s not a famous person who happened to do something dishonest. He is a person who is famous — singularly, even in an era of “alternative facts” — for spreading disinformation, about the inauguration, about the president’s claims that he was wiretapped by the previous administration, about Michael Flynn’s resignation. At least publicly, dishonesty is his brand.

So, OK, maybe “Dancing,” like the Emmys, sees the casting as a joke that Spicer is the butt of. At Wednesday’s announcement, the host, Tom Bergeron, gibed that Spicer would be “in charge of assessing audience size.” Later, he seemed to dissent from the casting decision on Twitter, saying he had wanted the season to be “a joyful respite from our exhausting political climate.”

In the past, “Dancing” cast Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader indicted in a money-laundering scandal, without reviving his political career. But it’s not as if people don’t come back, and even benefit, from being stunt-cast as the joke on “Dancing With the Stars.”

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry did the show after an excruciating mental short-circuit at a 2011 presidential debate in which he forgot the name of the Department of Energy. He now heads that department for Trump. (And if you still don’t think a reality show can burnish and enlarge a public reputation, maybe Google what Trump was doing from 2004 to 2015.)

I know it’s not as if ABC just hired Spicer to anchor the evening news. I know I might sound like a humorless scold for attacking the stunt-casting of a silly reality show.

But that’s just the point. To treat Spicer, and his reason for notoriety, as a harmless joke is to whitewash the harm of what he did, which was to say things so absurdly false that he invited his political side to join him in denying their own eyeballs, to encourage people to believe that facts don’t matter if they hurt your team.

To put him on a silly reality show is to say that he committed a silly offense and that you’re silly if you still make a big deal about it — everybody lies; everybody does what they’ve got to do to get by; everything’s a joke; just stop being such a fussbudget and enjoy the show.

Letting Sean Spicer tango onto prime time this fall is not the largest disgrace of all time. But it’s still a disgrace. Period.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Don't Let Sean Spicer Tap-Dance Out of Infamy on 'Dancing With the Stars'

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