White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer profusely apologized for saying that Adolf Hitler did not use poison gas against his own people the way Syrian President Bashar Assad did.

In the 88 years since President Herbert Hoover named a former Minneapolis Tribune reporter as the first White House press secretary, nobody who has held that job has stumbled as quickly or dramatically as Sean Spicer.

Millions have gaped at the spectacle of Spicer’s daily briefings on cable news. Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of him on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in an Easter bunny outfit similar to one he once wore at a White House holiday event, has turned Spicer into an improbable pop-culture figure. She portrays him as a lying buffoon who badgers the press.

By all accounts, the press secretary’s job is hard, and missteps are inevitable. “Even the best trip themselves up,” said Joe Lockhart, who took the job just weeks before President Bill Clinton was impeached in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Last week, Spicer profusely apologized for saying that Adolf Hitler did not use poison gas against his own people the way Syrian President Bashar Assad did. If it wasn’t the worst blunder of any White House press secretary since 1929, it was close.

But anyone who has held Spicer’s job knows what it feels like to make a gaffe at the White House lectern.

“When you get to a place where it doesn’t sound right, you just literally have to stop, even if it’s uncomfortable, and do a quick damage assessment in your head, and — particularly if it’s not what you meant — take a step back and overtly say, ‘I misspoke there,’” Lockhart said.

The White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group that helps new administrations organize their takeover of the government, has compiled a list of “lessons learned” from previous secretaries.

It’s part of a report prepared by the project’s director, Martha Joynt Kumar, also the author of “Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation.” A few of the key lessons:

Never lie

“Providing reporters with misinformation is a cardinal sin no matter whether it is willful or unintentional,” Kumar wrote in the report.

In Spicer’s case, that happened his first day on the job, at President Donald Trump’s behest. Spicer harangued reporters for questioning Trump’s untrue statement that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history. He antagonized the press further by taking no questions.

He also annoyed his boss. Trump reportedly was upset because Spicer wore a baggy suit.

It soon got worse. Spicer defended Trump’s false allegation that millions of immigrants committed voter fraud in November. He stood behind Trump’s unsubstantiated charge that President Barack Obama illegally tapped his phones in Trump Tower. And he touched off a rare diplomatic spat with a key ally when he repeated a Fox News report that British intelligence agents helped Obama bug Trump’s phones, an accusation Britain adamantly denied.

False statements at briefings are nothing new.

In 1960, President Eisenhower’s popular Press Secretary James Hagerty shook reporters’ trust when the administration was caught lying about an American U-2 spy plane shot down in the Soviet Union, Kumar recalled in an interview. Eisenhower was forced to admit that the cover story — a weather plane flying over Turkey had drifted off course — was a lie.