September 17, 2019

Sean Spicer’s Dancing Debut Was a Disaster. He Made It Even Worse Once the Cameras Were Off.

He posted, then deleted an odd attempt to drag Jesus Christ into his humiliation.

Clad in a frilly shirt and form-fitting white pants, Sean Spicer made his debut on Dancing with the Stars Monday night, where the former White House press secretary took the very last strands of his reputation and set them ablaze in a blinding, neon-green fire.
 
“What the hell is he wearing?” the internet collectively gasped, as Spicer shimmied and clapped for himself on stage, his clenched and overeager smile making the routine both more unwatchable and impossible to look away from. 
 
“It’s like you were being attacked by a swarm of wasps,” one judge told him.

At one point, the former Trump mouthpiece attempted to address the controversy over his casting. “There’s no question my time in the White House was very tumultuous,” he said in a video introduction, conveniently failing to mention his current employment as a spokesman for a pro-Trump super-PAC. “I think it gave people a very one-dimensional look at who I am as a person.” 

In the end, Spicer and teammate Lindsay Arnold could only eke out a disappointing 12 out of 30 score. But that was just the start. Hours after his most recent attempt to distance himself from his identity as the man who repeatedly and outlandishly lied on behalf of the president, Spicer appeared to make the case that his dancing ambitions were part of a wider culture war.
 
“Clearly the judges aren’t going to be with me,” Spicer wrote in a since-deleted tweet early Tuesday morning. “Let’s send the message to #Hollywood that those of us who stand for #Christ won’t be discounted. May God bless you.”

After drawing a fresh round of humiliation with the post, Spicer later replaced it with a more simple message:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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