Editor's Note: Chris Deacon is a postgraduate researcher in politics and international relations at the University of London and previously worked as an international commercial lawyer. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Last Thursday, President Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced that she would be resigning from her position. She stated that she hoped to be remembered as a transparent and honest press secretary but, given by this point she had not held a daily press briefing with journalists for almost 100 days, how can this be her legacy?

Sanders’ position as Donald Trump’s ultimate spokesperson was always going to be a difficult role. The U.S. president’s regular attacks on the media, including prominent White House correspondents who attend briefings given by the press secretary, put Sanders in a difficult position from the outset.

But Trump was hardly an unknown quantity when Sanders joined his administration six months into his presidency. She willingly signed up to represent a man who was already becoming synonymous with “fake news” and ad hominem attacks on the press, and she had every opportunity to leave her position earlier, had she so objected to Trump’s conduct.

Instead, in her role as press secretary, Sanders repeatedly supported the president’s questionable position on a variety of issues – not just, relatively understandably, refusing to condemn her boss, but repeating his talking points and perpetuating objectively false facts and figures.

Worse still, Sanders repeatedly went above and beyond to stand behind Trump by, herself, touting patently false information. Last year, for example, she stated "I certainly don’t think that the president at any point has done anything but condemn violence against journalists or anyone else."

As someone working with journalists every day, this statement was beyond the pale for many in the press. Trump had recently tweeted a mocked-up video of him physically attacking a wrestler, with the CNN logo placed over the individual’s face. There was nothing subtle about this; it was blatant incitement to violence against journalists, and Sanders knew that full well.

There were other cases of Sanders going as far as to clearly fabricate information. The Mueller Report revealed, for example, that her public assertions that James Comey had lost the confidence of the FBI were entirely false, and something she had made up "in the heat of the moment." Such a statement had no purpose other than to blindly assist her president by presenting false information.

It is a damning indictment of Sanders that she was only willing to admit the falseness of this information when it became possible that she would be prosecuted, and end up in prison, if she did not recant. For someone tasked with speaking for the most powerful politician in the world, this is a tragically low bar for feeling it necessary to tell the truth.

In this way, Sanders did not only permit and tolerate Trump’s attacks on the press – and on the truth – but also freely and willingly contributed to and participated in these attacks herself.

But by the time of her departure from Trump’s administration, Sanders’ role had already become redundant. Some have put the blame for this squarely on Sanders herself, accusing her of abandoning the daily briefings which are the hallmark of the White House press secretary.

Others have argued that Trump – never one to be overly happy about others speaking for him – de facto abolished the position while technically keeping Sanders in-post. As Sanders was reduced to simply repeating statements that Trump had made directly – commonly through Twitter – the irrelevancy of the briefings increased. They became shorter and rarer, before eventually disappearing completely.

Trump himself wrote on Twitter that he had instructed Sanders "not to bother" with briefing journalists at the White House any longer as, in his opinion, the media would only "rudely and inaccurately" cover her performance. And so we ended up with a press secretary who never briefed the press.

Sanders may hope that her legacy will be one of truthfulness and transparency, but this could not be any further from the truth. Her legacy, in fact, will be one of mistrust, and of the betrayal of her very office.

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