Today, Sean "Let Me Wave Something Shiny In Front of You Monkeys" Spicer engaged in some rhetoric that was reminiscent of the Melissa McCarthy takedown of him on Saturday night.
The department store Nordstrom recently decided to not renew its relationship with Trump's daughter-cum-advisor to provide it with various dresses, scents, baubles, and/or doodads for sale. This led to the following Tweet from Trump on both his personal and official White House accounts:
So, the Invisible Hand of the free market was not at work; it was politics.
Spicer offered slightly more than 140 characters at his press briefing, explaining the utterly understandable reasoning behind the oddity of a president personally and publicly berating a century-old business that employs 72,500 Americans.
"I think this is less about his family's business and an attack on his daughter . . . I think for people to take out their concern about his actions or his executive orders on members of his family, he has every right to stand up for his family and applaud their business activities, their success."
He went on to say the following:
However, what made it "clear" that there was an effort to undermine Trump-fille was not . . . well . . . made clear.
"There's a targeting of her brand and it's her name . . . She's not directly running the company. It's still her name on it. There are clearly efforts to undermine that name based on her father's positions on particular policies that he's taken. This is a direct attack on his policies and her name. Her because she is being maligned because they have a problem with his policies."
Indeed, what we're left with is an "argument" that because Trump perceives this as a slight, it must have been motivated to be a slight.
What is at issue is not whether or nor Nordstrom's decision was political, economic, or some combination of these (although the company itself said the decision was based on poor sales; if it had wanted to publicly rebuke Trump, one would think they would make no bones about their motivation).
Rather, the issue is the fact that even the possibility that it was economic is disallowed by both Trump and Spicer. Without any evidence to question Nordstrom's stated (and eminently understandable) motivations, we are left with the conclusion that it would not be possible for Nordstrom to sever a business tie with a member of the Trump family for any reason without it being lambasted as a personal attack on Trump himself.
In other words, even if one believes (despite lack of evidence) that this decision was made to stick a thumb in Trump's eye, the fact remains that there is no reason to think that even if it had been a decision based on the cold, hard logic of the Excel spreadsheet, the response would have been any different.
On one hand, this underscores the circular, self-reinforcing "logic" lampooned on SNL ("you're words!") and, as such, is amusing.
On the other hand, it raises in miniature the myriad ethical problems encountered when one has a chief executive who sees his governmental position as simply his most recent expansion of his familial empire.
Oh, and FYI, Nordstrom stock was up 4% on the day.
