Barry Soper: It's not what Donald Trump said, but what he meant

COMMENT: What you clearly hear is not what you were meant to hear. It may have been said, but it's not what was meant.

Well that's what Donald Trump's devout Christian spin doctor with the Arkansas drawl has to contend with daily. The Beehive spinners must look on in awe and disbelief as Sara Huckabe Sanders tells us what The Don meant to say even though we all hear what he actually said.

Last week we were told on several occasions what he did say he didn't mean. As the week drew to a close a question was asked twice, did he believe Russia was still targeting the US. Thanking the questioner very much he said a distinct "No" before going on to say how tough he'd been on Vladimir Putin.

So the "No" didn't relate to the question, it related to whether he was willing to take any questions, his press secretary drawled several hours later.

Surely the 35 year old Sanders must lose sleep at night thinking about how to interpret what The President meant rather than what he said. But since taking over from the equally unconvincing Sean Spicer, after fronting for him when the FBI director Jamie Comey was fired just over a year ago, Sanders has been a loyal interpreter.

When Comey accused Trump of lying about the way he was sacked she leapt to his defence saying The Don definitely wasn't a liar and she frankly found it insulting the question would be asked. Surely it should have been asked, if for nothing else to give him the right of reply.

A month later she was again defending the indefensible, telling the media at a briefing that the President "in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence."

As a member of his Presidential campaign team, Sanders should have recalled his campaign speech when he said "if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them would you? I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees, I promise."

The boot was on the other foot when Sanders was chucked out of a restaurant last month because she worked for Trump. He zeroed in on the restaurant saying it should focus more on its filthy canopies, doors and windows, which were badly in need of a paint job, rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sanders.

His rule of thumb, if a restaurant's dirty on the outside, it's dirty on the inside. That's despite the fact that it easily passed its most recent inspections.

Never has the saying, never let facts stand in the way of a good story, been truer than it is at the White House today.