The rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner takes place tonight in Washington DC – and the entertainment will be a magician, because that’s who you book to perform at a party for a toddler
Tonight, the leading lights of American journalism will put on tuxedoes and frocks and share expensive steak and fine wine with the guy who wants to destroy them.
And you’ve got to wonder why.
The rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner takes place this evening in Washington DC. The previous edition, you’ll remember, was abandoned after someone ran in with a homemade shotgun and tried to assassinate Trump and his cabinet.
The event is supposedly a celebration of the first amendment, which protects freedom of the press and free speech. But in order for the President to agree to attend, the event was radically changed. Out was the comedian host who would gently roast the President and his cabinet – and in his place? A magician.
Because who else would you book as the entertainment for a party where the guest of honour is an overgrown toddler? I suppose we should think ourselves lucky it’s taking place in a swanky hotel and not at a soft play centre.
The do-over will take place at the Waldorf Astoria – formerly the Trump Hotel in DC – and comes at a time when Trump’s attacks on the media have reached unprecedented levels, even by his standards.
The Justice Department is currently in court demanding phone records from New York Times journalists, their spouses and in one case, their MOTHER, to try and smoke out who leaked sensitive information to the paper about a story.
And which story prompted the administration to take such unheard of, antidemocratic, frankly un-American action?
The stupid story about Trump’s Qatari jet not having the security features it needed to fly the President around safely. A story that was so obvious to most people that it barely needed telling.
(It’s also quite funny that it’s this story they chose to send subpoenas over, and not the leak to the same newspaper’s reporters of recordings of meetings held in the Situation Room. Presumably because they already know who leaked those.)
The move will almost certainly be blocked by judges – but that’s not the point. As with most of Trump’s legal fights with the media – from the AP to CBS News to the Wall Street Journal to the BBC – the process is the punishment. It’s not about winning in court, it’s about intimidating journalists and – more importantly – their sources.
Of course, this is just Trump’s latest attack on the press. He frequently swerves questions he doesn’t like by attacking the journalist, or their employer, as dishonest or corrupt, accusing them of lying, calling them “piggy”. It’s particularly dicey being a woman in the White House Press Corps, unless you’re one of the paid propagandists from organisations like Lindell TV, who Trump has invited into the press room to dilute the proper questions he and his team are subjected to.
And it doesn’t end with Trump. His public description of anyone trying to hold him to account as “fake news” was understandably attractive to politicians around the world that it rapidly became the done thing to attack the media. Nigel Farage does it, Jeremy Corbyn did it. I spent a lot of time at CPAC GB last week, and was personally described from the stage as the “enemy” for accurately writing and reporting what was going on there.
So I return to my earlier question. If you’re a journalist in Washington, why would you ever accept an invitation to a dinner where the guest of honour is Donald Trump?
The New York Times have the right idea. They have a longstanding policy of not attending as guests, but instead turning up to cover it as an event.
Of course, if nobody turned up to the dinner last year, nobody would have been there to report on the shots fired and the scramble to safety. But there’s no reason a night of reporting on Trump has to come with a plate of chateaubriand. In a normal world the reaction to Trump’s behaviour would be empty tables and dozens of reporters standing around the walls.
Even better, the White House Correspondents Association could just…disinvite Trump. It’s happened without the President before. There is absolutely no requirement for an organisation to invite a guy who calls its members “piggy” and undermines them whenever possible over for dinner. It’s like the National Association of Electric Cars inviting Jeremy Clarkson to speak at their annual conference.
Other groups have managed not to invite him to things, most notably the Nobel Committee. The worst that could happen if he wasn’t invited is that he’d get a bit upset and Gianni Infantino would have to invent a “FIFA CHAMPION OF THE NEWS” medal to give him.
They could just…not invite him.
But they won’t.