Why I’m boycotting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Donald Trump is the greatest human to ever populate the planet — at least as he tells it. And he has a great plan, whatever it is at any given moment to satisfy wherever his latest whim has taken him. 

This weekend it will take him to the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as president, where he’ll be sure to remind the audience of increasingly friendly and compliant reporters — softened by buyouts and diluted by right-wing propagandists posing as independent reporters — of his greatness.

Trump has refused every invitation from the White House Correspondents Association since his first administration. He has mostly avoided the event since then-President Barack Obama skewered him at the 2011 dinner for promoting the infamous “birther” conspiracy. (The last time Trump attended was in 2015 as he was preparing to run for president.)

When Trump refused his invitation in 2017, Comedy Central’s Hasan Minhaj, serving as host, channeled his inner Don Rickles as he roasted the newly-elected president. “Even the president is not beyond the reach of the First Amendment. But the president didn’t show up because Donald Trump doesn’t care about free speech,” Minhaj said. “The man who tweets everything that enters his head refuses to acknowledge the amendment that allows him to do it.” Trump simply said he didn’t have time to spend with the “fake news” media.

A year later he again refused to attend, sending White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders instead. She told us the president encouraged her appearance, and she was all smiles when meeting celebrities and politicians. She was even cordial to me. After comedian Michelle Wolf satirized the president, Sanders’ demeanor changed. Trump, I was told at the time, was “livid.”

The next day the president of the WHCA emailed the organization’s members, saying in part, “Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.” It was faux outrage from a ravaged press. 

In 2019, Trump again did not attend the dinner. That year, because of Wolf’s monologue the year before, the WHCA opted not to have a comedian and sent an historian to bore us for several minutes instead. He didn’t offend anyone except those who wanted to be entertained. At the time we were possibly prepping for war with Iran, and a few days before the event I asked Trump if he planned to initiate a conflict: “Mr. President, are we going to war with Iran?” He replied, “I hope not.” He said he was more worried about his “Big and Bold” new immigration plan.

Seven years later, we — and Trump — are in nearly the same place. Iran and immigration are in the news every day, and the president still hates the press. So why show up this year? What’s different?

The answer is easy. Trump has, like Kathy Bates did to James Caan in “Misery,” hobbled the press, and he has decided to gloat. As Jim Acosta, the independent reporter and former CNN correspondent and anchor who tangled with and sued Trump during the president’s first term, told me, “I think he wants to go in there and spike the ball in everybody’s faces and say ‘ha ha I won.’” 

Trump determines who will serve in the White House press pool. He has closed the West Wing’s upper press area, the place where, in years past, members of the press and administration forged working relationships that helped the president communicate his agenda and allowed staff get to know reporters in an informal setting.

Trump has sued news organizations, banned reporters, insulted and dismissed them. His staff has made sure that “new media” organizations get hard press passes so they can come to the Brady Briefing Room and ask softball questions that often seem crafted by Trump himself. He recently threatened to jail reporters for their coverage of the Iran war.

This week alone shows just how dangerous the Trump administration is to an independent press. As Clayton Weimers, the North American Director of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement. “In the same week that Kash Patel filed a flimsy lawsuit against the Atlantic for a story he didn’t like, we also learned that his FBI desperately combed through its databases to find dirt on a New York Times journalist whose reporting embarrassed him.” 

With Trump’s planned attendance Saturday night at the Washington Hilton, some reporters have said they’ll wear pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins prominently displaying the words of the First Amendment. More than 250 reporters, including former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather and former ABC White House reporter Sam Donaldson, signed an open letter urging our colleagues to mount a “forceful defense” against Trump’s “systematic, sustained and unprecedented attacks” against the press. “These are not normal times,” the letter reads, “and this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis.”

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I will not be attending. I have no desire to participate in this hypocrisy. I have no faith that the corporations currently running America’s largest media companies will ever make a spirited stand against Trump, though they should. Too many of them have close ties to the president, government contracts and no interest in sacrificing profits for public service. 

Any words spoken for free speech on Saturday night will mean little and carry almost no weight in the fight against a man who only cares about himself. As a long-time reporter who successfully stood up to Trump during his first administration and continues to push back at him in this one, I am tired of gestures that do little and mean less. Why should reporters need to be encouraged to stand up to the president? Acosta, April Ryan, Kaitlan Collins, Jeff Mason, Mara Liasson, Steve Holland, Jonathan Karl, myself and others proved that not only was it possible, but it was also the only way to keep from becoming what the majority of the press is today: spineless and worthless.

We have been belittled by the president, routinely called fake news and the “true enemy of the people.” Trump’s cosplaying defense secretary has likened us to the Pharisees of the Bible who betrayed Jesus. (You only need one guess to figure out who he thinks Jesus is in this scenario.) 

The WHCA dinner was long ago nicknamed “nerd prom” for mixing celebrities, power brokers and reporters into a large banquet room where we could let our hair down and enjoy a few laughs. And it’s all ostensibly for a very good cause: a scholarship fund for college journalism students. But it has devolved into the worst sort of public spectacle; reporters sucking up to politicians and celebrities for greater access — a chance to be part of a crowd they’ll never join.  

And as much as I respect Dan and Sam, and everyone else who signed the letter, and as much as I agree with its sentiments, I fear their warning will mean little in the long run. If you’re going to stand up to Trump, the time to do it is in the press room — or when you have direct access to him. The pushback there is tepid at best and non-existent at worst.

The WHCA board is interested in protecting the access of the large corporations that have hired them. Even if they wish to speak up, reporters are limited in what they can say, at least if they wish to keep their jobs. So do not expect much from the organization’s board at the dinner. As Acosta told me, “Screw that. I’m not going.”

The best we can hope for now are reporters in the briefing room willing to support their colleagues when the president insults them and by following up on each other’s questions. That’s how we used to do it. That’s not how it’s done today. 

“I hate it when you all ask the same question,” Larry Speakes, the long-time acting press secretary for Ronald Reagan, once said to me after a briefing in which he had been continually peppered with questions by Donaldson and press pool veteran Helen Thomas. “It makes it sound like I didn’t answer the question.” Thomas, who was standing next to me, shot back, “That’s because you didn’t.”

We have sacrificed our duty to the American public for profit, access and a seat at a corrupt table. We must not only push back, but do more. We must move beyond parsing each word, every day, searching for meaning in gibberish.

It is important to investigate the outcome of what Trump is doing — and that’s something that doesn’t make headlines enough. We are more concerned with the president’s insults, ill-temper and divisive nature. That’s what goes viral.  

Our interconnected society resembles every worst part of civilization throughout history, but with a few new fetishes of its own. Perhaps that’s the price of interconnectivity, which is the cultural equivalent of meth. It speeds things up, but you’re hit so often by bits of misinformation, disinformation and the occasional fact, that personally vetting everything is as difficult as following a horse after it’s been given a stool softener. But it smells worse, and since it’s addicting, it takes a heavier toll on our collective physical and mental health. 

Can we follow Alexander Hamilton’s guidance in Federalist No. 1, for “good government” through “reflection and choice,” rather than relying on “accident and force?” 

I’m still patiently waiting for a president or Congress that will break up media monopolies and ban media companies from having business contracts with the government. If our government took those two simple steps, they would do much to clean up the greatest problems confronting journalism. Hell, a political hero or two might even be made.  

No one has ever tried so hard to destroy, demean and belittle free thought as Donald Trump. When he says we get it wrong and he has many friends who are reporters, I’m reminded of the racist who claims his closest friends are Black. I don’t believe either one of them. And 11 years into the Trump era, I continue to question my own actions. I am haunted by the questions I should have asked and the clues that I missed.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that he had “sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of mind.” Today we don’t mind the tyranny, it seems, as long as it keeps us comfortable.

I hope the WHCA proves me wrong.