Trump and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Deserve Each Other

Make ready the orchestra of tiny violins, everyone! This weekend, Washington, D.C.’s greatest collection of reprobates and dweebs will gather at the Washington Hilton for the annual tribute to meretriciousness that is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Alas, there is bad news to report: President Donald Trump will be ruining the affair by attending it, after several years of ruining it by not attending it. As a result, people are so upset that they’re calling for this weekend’s big party to be called off entirely.

It almost goes without saying that Trump’s personal opinions on free speech put him at odds with the theme that the White House Correspondents’ Association concocted for its annual bacchanal: a celebration of the First Amendment. A few weeks ago, Trump threatened to jail journalists over coverage of an Iranian airstrike on a U.S. fighter jet. Meanwhile, Paramount has decided to invite to its table Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr, who has spent the last year launching spurious probes into various news organizations for unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration.

As if that were not enough open hostility, The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday that Trump plans some sort of “revenge attack” speech against the press corps Saturday night, after which he intends to turn tail and run home. The WHCA’s response to these aggressions seems maximally ineffectual by design: Its members will wear “pocket squares or pins touting the importance of the First Amendment.”

But should we regard the journalists into whose punchbowl the president is pissing as worthy and capable guardians of those freedoms? Or, honestly, guardians of anything? It was at last year’s party that Axios reporter Alex Thompson, upon winning the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence, rode in on his high horse to perform a ritual admonishment of those in attendance for not properly covering the story of President Joe Biden’s advanced age. “Being truth tellers,” he chastised, “also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Well, since we once again have an infirm and mentally dysfunctional man running the country that few in the media seem worried about, it’s worth asking if anyone in the D.C. press corps actually learned anything. It’s also worth answering: not really. While The New York Times, notably, has gone long several times on Trump’s decline in recent months, good luck finding similar reporting from the likes of Axios.

I’m not the only one with knives out for the WHCD, though Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher has a decidedly different reason for calling for the dinner’s cancellation. “An event celebrating the free press should not spotlight Donald Trump, the biggest threat to the free press,” he writes. Scher is certainly right to criticize the WHCA for the way it has “reconfigured the event to make it more to Trump’s liking, chucking the comedian slot and, instead, naming as headliner Oz Pearlman, described by The New York Times as the ‘manosphere’s favorite magician.’” But the lion’s share of the piece—which begins with Scher’s “confession” that he’s a “fan” of the event—is devoted to making the chummy party seem aboveboard, for the purpose of suggesting that it’s Trump’s presence that, finally and at last, has created something truly odious.

Cue the self-serving justifications. “I always view such events as opportunities for source-building, vetting of coverage ideas and networking,” argues NPR’s Eric Deggans. “I may be having fun with my colleagues from NPR, but I’m also low-key working my beat.” I have heard variations on this idea from all sorts of reporters over the years. Maybe things are different when you’re on the media/celebrity beat, but I don’t find this argument compelling for political reporters. If you broke a story because you attended the dinner, tell your readers—they deserve to know that you’re not just there collecting selfies and canapés. Here’s a fun fact: President Barack Obama executed the hit on Osama bin Laden on White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, almost as if he knew the best time to run a secret special op was when every reporter would be nearby, basking in their own self-regard. (A better-sourced Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson famously scooped everyone on the bin Laden raid.)

At least The Atlantic’s Paul Farhi is willing to state up front that the fête was extremely tacky long before Trump became president. “Even in the best of times, the [dinner] is an awkward and ethically fraught affair,” he writes: “The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.” It’s actually a little under-sung just how bad the dinner was during its supposed halcyon days of the Obama administration. As Meredith Shiner wrote in Rolling Stone back in 2022, it was during this period that the WHCA really rammed its head up its own ass by making “celebrity the end goal of public service” and setting the stage for the parade of horribles to come. As Shiner observes:

Of course, it also should be noted that [Trump’s] attendance at the dinner in 2011—and Obama’s joke about him during his set—helped fuel the hate fire for his own White House run. Nothing about the grossness of this one weekend of cocktail parties or Democrats wanting to be cool by association invalidates the much more significant grossness of how media and celebrity normalized Trump, helped him attain power, and profited off keeping him there.

In this way, having Trump in attendance at this year’s dinner isn’t some troubling aberration. It’s really the logical end point of the whole affair; the apotheosis of Official Washington and its trashy pretentions. Far from canceling the dinner, let’s make it mandatory that Trump, his Cabinet, and all media elites attend, so we can bar the doors and force them to answer for their sins against our civic fabric.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.