While the former White House Press Secretary’s appearance on the Primetime Emmy Awards this Sunday was unexpected and earned a few laughs, this offhand event alludes to a much darker reality: that the press secretary just admitted to repeatedly lying to appease President Trump.

From the beginning of his time as press secretary, Spicer has been almost too easy to single out; with his high-voiced, stumbling statements and his often-overblown generalizations that left the White House press room, and the press in general, with no real factual news. Thus spawned the era of ‘fake news’- the backlash to such misinformation. Spicer was then thrown into a whirlwind of battles with both sides, the press on one trying to get as much real information as they could, and distrust from the White House itself, as Spicer is a GOP and Washington DC insider. Spicer’s frustrated outbursts in the press room even earned him his very own SNL parody, done by none other than Melissa McCarthy.

This contention soon culminated into one shell-shocking weekend: Spicer resigns from the position of the White House Press Secretary on July 21, 2017, out of nowhere. The immediate reason for Spicer’s resignation was the addition of Anthony Scaramucci (who would soon be fired) to the White House team, a move that Spicer vehemently opposed, but this was most likely a culmination of the troubles Spicer had faced since the beginning of his position.

Since then, Spicer has been relatively quiet. Then he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel on September 14. Although throughout the course of his show Kimmel seemed to be calling Spicer out through his discussion of the facts and his misinformation about the inauguration, each jab was bookended with laughter and light jest- Spicer was not truly being called out, he would remain in tact.

Then came the mother of all appearances; his cameo at the Primetime Emmy Awards during Steven Colbert’s hosting monologue. Spicer rolled out of the wings in the White House press room podium (much like the motorized version in the SNL skits) and claimed that ‘This will be the biggest Emmys. Ever’, satirizing his claims he made about the inauguration crowd during his time as press secretary. This was met with gasps from the crowd, a few nervous laughs, a wide-eyed Melissa McCarthy, and a truly hilarious reaction from Anna Chumskly of Veep. Later in the night, pictures surfaced of various celebrities cozying up to Spicer, notably a picture of James Corden kissing Spicer on the cheek.

While this was (presumably) done in good fun, the implications of this appearance reach far deeper than surely Colbert or the Emmys team anticipated. By exaggerating the size of the Emmys audience, an obviously baseless claim, and relating it to what Spicer did during his position is an incredibly scary implication that was handled with such flippancy that you would think everybody had already forgotten what Spicer had done. The fact that a White House press secretary lied just in order to appease the president is autocratic in essence, and should not at all occur within the executive or any other branch of government.

By allowing Spicer this chance at jest, Hollywood has condoned his past actions of literally lying to the American people, and has turned that into something to be laughed at and made light of. This indicates a dangerous trend for American society in the future: that lying and concealment of truth coming from the highest order in the land has become acceptable and is now the new normal.

We, the American people, cannot allow this to happen. We cannot condone this blatant mocking of the value of truth; we need truth from the White House in order to continue to understand our entire way of life and how that life relates to other countries. Although Trump’s presidency has been a tempest in and of itself, with no help from misinformation, untruths harm the American people as much as they conflate President Trump’s image, which is what this entire thing is about. We must resist this emphasis on ego and focus on the facts, thinking critically about what the world around us is actually saying. By doing this we will all better make it through the next four years, together.