I was gobsmacked by Cynthia Dill’s column on Aug. 5 (“Sarah Huckabee Sanders maintains dignity in face of Jim Acosta”).

Right after the 2016 election, Leslie Stahl called out Trump on his attacks on the media: “I said, ‘You know, that is getting tired. Why are you doing this? You’re doing it over and over. It’s boring and it’s time to end that.’ ”

His response? “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

He freely admits he wants to damage the free press, a vital democratic institution. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is his willing and eager accomplice.

His rhetoric puts reporters in actual physical danger. Jim Acosta turned CNN’s cameras on the seething mob at last Tuesday’s Tampa rally to illustrate the rage directed at him.

Katy Tur later recounted a piece of hate mail she got: ” ‘I hope you get raped and killed,’ one person wrote to me just this week.” She adds the note ended with, “MAGA,” short for the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again.”

So, Acosta (rightly) put Sanders on the spot at Wednesday’s White House press briefing. He asked her to disavow Trump’s “Enemy of the People” rhetoric. Ms. Dill said this was a “self-serving, useless question.” After five reporters were killed on June 28 in Annapolis? Really?

Here’s part of that response that she read from prepared notes: “One of the worst cases was the reporting on the U.S. ability to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late ’90s. Because of that reporting, he stopped using that phone and the country lost valuable intelligence.”

That story, like much of what Sanders spews, is an easily disprovable lie. It was debunked 13 years ago. So, Sanders lies and refuses to disavow dangerous rhetoric. Pretty dignified, don’t you think, Ms. Dill?

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