Last week, a few miles from the Pentagon, at a dance studio in a strip mall, Sean Spicer slid several feet on his knees across a polished wooden floor. A producer wearing khaki shorts with pineapples on them coached him from the sidelines: “When you’re done sliding, hold it for five seconds,” he said. Spicer, President Trump’s former press secretary, was rehearsing for his début as a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.” After resigning from his White House job (Trump’s counsellor Kellyanne Conway invented the phrase “alternative facts” to describe Spicer’s press-conference style), he taught at Harvard and published a tell-all book (thesis: “I was beginning to realize I had misspoken badly”), and is now moving on to reality television.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” Spicer said, standing in the mirrored studio. He was wearing green athletic shorts, a gray T-shirt, black ballroom shoes, and no makeup. “Frankly, I’m just making money, trying to enjoy life.” To dance on television, he will be paid at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—more each week that he does not get eliminated. “They try to have a diverse cast,” he said. “Mark Cuban, sports people, Hollywood folks, Tom DeLay”—the former Majority Whip, who appeared before being convicted on money-laundering charges—“Rick Perry, Tucker Carlson, Bristol Palin. They’ve had a lot of conservative-slash-political folks. I’d say I’m in that lineage.”
He was joined that day by his professional dance partner, who has been featured on many seasons of “Dancing with the Stars.” (Her name will be revealed on the season’s première.) “Sean’s really persistent, but he doesn’t have a lot of upper-body-isolation movement,” she said. She wondered if he’d been practicing. “Be honest. Did you work on this while I was gone?” she asked him. Then she said, “We got a shimmy down—like a little chest pop—but his body just does not move that way. It’s not even that he needs to learn how to do it, it’s just that he doesn’t have the flexibility for it.”
Spicer defended his learning style. “I’m very visual when I learn,” he said. “I’m not one of those people who can, like, read directions. If I get a set of directions, instead of reading it, I YouTube it.” Spicer likes to watch a tape of each day’s rehearsal and study what he needs to improve.
Did he see any parallels between dancing on TV and his tenure as press secretary? “None,” he said. “Well, maybe puns: like, dancing around things?” He said that, when he watched clips of himself giving press briefings, “I would go, Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I came off that way. I should’ve kept that answer tighter.” The rehearsal studio is on the other side of the Potomac from the Holocaust Museum (Spicer once referred to Auschwitz as a “Holocaust center”) and from the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial (he once told the press that “just the other day” Trump “sat down with civil-rights leader M.L.K., Jr.”).
A producer wanted to shoot a reel of Spicer and his partner rehearsing, to use on the show. He filmed Spicer putting on his knee pads, which were dinged from days of practice.
“Do you know what a tango is?” Spicer’s partner asked him.
“No,” he said. “Well, I know that it’s fast, and a little Latin.”
“It’s a sharp, accented dance,” she told him. “We saw the fun Spicey, but this is serious.”
The producer wanted to start again at the knee slide. Spicer’s partner gave him some notes. “I’d rather you slide only, like, two inches, and have a big moment,” she said. “I’d rather have it be a mini slide than a massive fall.”
Afterward, they solemnly watched the first take on a monitor.
“The slide looks like it’s just checking the box,” Spicer said, dejected.
“You’re O.K.,” his partner said. “Nothing’s worse than a cringey moment, and I’m not seeing you do that. It looks clean, and it doesn’t look painful.”
They’d been rehearsing six days a week. “For my wedding, my wife and I took a lesson or two,” Spicer said. “And then we thought, This is silly, we’ll just wing it. I basically didn’t dance at my own wedding.”
Spicer’s dance partner counted out, “Five, six, seven, eight,” and then she and Spicer tangoed across the room. “Elbow up, drop the shoulder,” she barked. After ninety minutes, Spicer was breathless and sweaty. Eyes closed in concentration, he took a few spins around the studio, partnerless, going over the routine on his own.
His partner gave him more tips. “Everything needs to be regal and upright,” she said. “Think of it as though you’re walking under a small ceiling. And what did I tell you to do if the floor is slippery? Take small steps.”
Spicer took it all in. “If you suck, you get kicked off,” he said. “From a military standpoint, I’m an after-action person, like: What went well? How did that go? That’s how I’ve lived most of my life.” ♦
