Answering A Question With A Question

I am not sure if it makes me feel any better, but a familiarity with the works of Lewis Carroll helps me to track the logic of the Trump White House. Let's take, for example, the dismissal by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of the suggestion that our "President" might be racist. “I think that is an outrageous claim,” Sanders told reporters on Tuesday, adding that if he was who critics said he was, “why did NBC give him a show for a decade on TV? Why did Chuck Schumer and all of his colleagues come and beg Donald Trump for money? …Why did they want to be with him for years and years, whether it was various activities and fundraisers, and other sorts of things?”
Why indeed, Sarah.
In the history of show business, which is the milieu to which Ms. Huckabee Sanders was referring, there have been a number of aberrant personalities have held positions of responsibility and even stardom in places where their quirks and ugly behavior were tolerated in exchange for ratings. Or ticket sales. Or publicity for publicity's sake. P.T. Barnum, acclaimed by many as The World's Greatest Showman, once said,  “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.”  He is also the guy who gave us the assertion that there is a sucker born every minute. 
And that would be the answer I would give the White House Secretary, whose job is to answer questions, not to ask them. It's that kind of squirrely logic that runs rampant in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days. Like kicking a reporter out of the Oval Office because the "President" did not like the tenor of the questions being asked, on immigration: “Just Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world… people of color?”
All of which is why, sitting in a movie theater last weekend watching The Post, the crowd around me murmured and chuckled knowingly at the attacks by the Nixon administration on the press. How does this keep happening? Maybe I should ask Sarah Huckabee Sanders.