They’ll defend anything. Sanders will defend anything. Trump could eat a toddler on live tv and she would say “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who has a big appetite.”

“There’s no way that this is sexist at all,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defending the tweet during her daily press briefing Tuesday afternoon. “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who responds,” she also said. “We’ve said that many times before.”

Look, that’s such a vacuous thing to say. Look, you can’t just brush aside loathsome sexist and racist tweets and remarks by saying he’s always going to be sexist and racist. Look, you can’t just blithely excuse everything by telling us what we already know, which is that Trump is a guy who does shit like this. We know he is; that’s the point – he’s a terrible human being and a disgrace to the country.

Of the five senators who at the time of Trump’s tweet had called for the president to resign, Gillibrand was the only woman. She was also the only one he went after on Twitter.

But Sanders insisted that has nothing to do with Gillibrand’s gender. “This is simply talking about a system that we have that is broken in which special interests control our government and I don’t think that there’s probably many people that are more controlled by political contributions than the senator the president referenced,” Sanders said, expanding on the president’s tweet with a more serious charge.

Ironically, it’s true that we have a broken system and that corporate interests control our government, but the implication that Trump opposes that is laughable.