I tuned up C-Span on Saturday night (not my first choice for a weekend binge) with the expectation that the White House Correspondents Association dinner would be darkly fascinating, like the way a multi-car crash commands attention when we rubberneck. The very idea that the Washington press corps would actually break bread with the demagogue who’s bent on destroying them…even now, after everything that’s happened, writing those words makes me sick enough to pine for Dramamine.
But wow. What a rancid stew that was. If the writer’s room of America in Decline had ever packed so many indigestible ingredients into the same episode, the TV critics would surely have complained that it was too “on the nose.”
Before the bullets broke the evening, I was fixated on the spectacle itself. What could be more pathetic, I asked myself, than a ballroom of gowned and tuxedoed broadcasters and scribes suckling on the teat of a fascist who treats them with contempt, pees on the First Amendment, and fantasizes about journalists getting raped in prison? Would a firefighters convention invite an arsonist as its honored guest? Would the Fraternal Order of Police reserve a seat on the dais for a convicted criminal? The press association, which is helmed by one of Bari Weiss’ See-BS staffers, did the latter.
Then came the spasm of violence that is so inherently American, and within seconds the entire roomful of swells played duck and cover - just like our school kids who face this threat on a daily basis - because nobody in power, and certainly none of the MAGA “celebrities” in that room, have had the slightest interest in curbing access to firearms. Nor has the press’ honored guest, who loves violence so much that he impelled thousands of goons to storm the U.S. Capitol, beat up cops, and build a gallows to hang the honored guest’s veep.
With no time to finish their spring pea and burrata salads, everyone had to shelter in place - just like the common folk who’ve done so, and will continue to do so, in schools, churches, synagogues, restaurants, theaters, groceries, and other public spaces without the ostensibly protective shield of the Secret Service, FBI, DHS, and DC police. On Saturday night none of them were able to safeguard the thin veneer of civilization. There have been 511 documented mass shootings in the last 60 years - an annual average of eight or nine - and rest assured that future victims won’t have a fancy ballroom to protect them.
Ah yes, the ballroom. Leave it to Trump to turn the evening’s trauma into a real estate pitch for his latest toy. When he returned to the White House, supposedly to utter a few words of reassurance to a rattled nation, supposedly to “bring us together” the way normal presidents are summoned to do, his script was narcissism on steroids. Big surprise, I know.
Because of what happened at the press dinner, “this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House,” he said. “It’s actually a larger room, and it’s a much more secure. It’s got its drone proof, its bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That’s why Secret Service, that’s why the military are demanding it. They wanted the ballroom for 150 years.”
They wanted the ballroom “for 150 years?” I won’t bother to fact-check that doozy because I have a life.
He also believes that being targeted is a testament to his purported greatness. He told the press pool: “Well, you know, I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most (get shot at)…When you look at the people that have either, whether it was an attempt or a successful attempt, they’re very impactful people. Just take a look at the names here. The big names. And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot…When you’re impactful, (shooters) go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone.”
So he feels “honored.” But his assassination study deserves a D. It’s an historical fact that Gerald Ford was not impactful, yet he was targeted twice. James Garfield was in office only four months, with no time to be impactful, when he was shot. Ronald Reagan was in office only two months when he was shot by a nut who was only trying to impress Jodie Foster. But the White House press pool, for which I have some sympathy, had to sit there and listen to his nonsense because the quality of discourse has been so degraded.
Speaking of degraded: He managed to mumble one rote sentence that his aides had surely crafted, mindful of the horrors that had so recently transpired. Here it is, in its entirety: “I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our differences peacefully. We have to - we have to resolve our differences.”
Then, less than 24 hours later, during a quickie sitdown for 60 Minutes, when he was asked whether there’s anything a president can do about political violence, he replied: “I do think the hate speech of the Democrats is very dangerous. I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is - is very dangerous.” That, from the guy who joked about Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten with a hammer; that, from the guy who said nothing last year when two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers were assassinated by a MAGA extremist.
Nor does the press association’s honored guest seem willing to “resolve” his “differences” with the press. When 60 Minutes host Nora O’Donnell asked him to comment on the alleged shooter’s manifesto - which said, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes” - he lashed out in predictable snowflake mode:
“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re - you’re he - you’re horrible people. Horrible people…I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview and they’ll probably’ - I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that…You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview. You - you’re disgraceful.”
So there it was, a toxic trifecta: Obsequious banquet starring an unprecedented enemy of the free press; gun violence rendering the event DOA; narcissism and nonsense in the aftermath from the unrepentant honored guest.
How I pine for the good old days! In the 1987 movie Broadcast News, the TV producer played by Holly Hunter arrives at the correspondents dinner and nears the security checkpoint. But at the last second she veers away, fearful that the inspectors will unclasp her purse and discover the condoms she’d packed for an envisioned tryst with William Hurt. Not a gun in sight anywhere. That’s more my speed.
