There’s No Need to Reschedule the Correspondents’ Dinner

This weekend’s assassination attempt targeting members of the Trump administration provoked the now-standard set of responses to outbreaks of political violence: the rush to detect rigid partisan motivations in an otherwise complicated and contested act; bad faith requests to suppress political speech; the high formalist calls for national unity from above.

These formal settings of the theater of recrimination are the means by which the country’s national discourse avoids the trauma of political violence and leaves intact the real conditions that foment political terror. Yet this latest episode at least offers one path to a meaningful answer. If calls for comity and common goals aren’t enough to stop the country’s slide into ever-deepening currents of political chaos, we can at least begin to shut down our country’s cottage industry in false comity. It is high time to put aside, once and for all, the backdrop to this latest assassination attempt: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Cole Thomas Allen, the alleged assassin, probably just took over the Correspondents’ Dinner as a place with relatively porous security. Indeed, in the post about his plan to target senior Trump officials, he marveled at how easily he was able to hide his cache of guns and knives while staying at the Washington hotel hosting the dinner, known in the city as the “Hinckley Hilton” because it was also the site of the attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Yet while the event provided a relatively obliging target of opportunity, he also underlies one of the most toxic fictions behind the collapse of our democracy: the idea that the national political press and the executive branch of our government are equal, chummy partners in running the state.

This fable is extremely flattering to members of the Beltway press, who eagerly flock to the WHCD show as immediate validation of their civic and cultural influence. This is why the unhealthy exercise of the elite media frantically recruiting A-list celebrities to sit at their dinner table has become the primary source of jaw-dropping gossip and speculation in an otherwise tsarist-quality spectacle of journalistic prostration to power. Which is why, for months before the event itself, nominally adult members of the Washington press corps frantically ask for favors and make desperate smartphone calls for access to this or that lavishly hosted afterparty, convened at an embassy or nightclub rented by Bloomberg, so that they can continue to be seen rubbing shoulders and spilling drinks with the country’s ruling elite and celebrity class.

The rationale given for all this has always been that it is an opportunity to deepen the (already corrupt) practice of access journalism by allowing journalists and government sources to put aside their structural differences of interest for an evening and enjoy each other’s well-lubricated company. But for this alibi to hold water, someone somewhere would now have to be able to point to a concrete scoop or productive thaw in press-government relations from all this chatter. I’ve lived in Washington for a quarter of a century, and amid all the secrecy, whisper campaigns and speculation that propel Washington, DC journalism, I’ve never heard even the slightest suggestion that the Correspondents’ Dinner served any useful news-gathering purpose.

The Potemkin courtesy of the Correspondents’ Dinner and the ring road pontitocracy that embraces it is in fact a matter of hierarchy and control of the boundaries of opinion of a respectable elite. This is why security protocols for the event, even in the carefully mythologized years of Barack Obama’s “post-racial” presidency, followed an overtly racist logic. That’s why there can be a journalistic atrocity like the drinks reception hosted by Skydance CEO David Ellison, who chairs CBS News and is set to lead CNN in his company’s proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The president spoke for an hour there, while Ellison’s MAGA-picked CBS News editor Bari Weiss sat at Trump’s table, while administration officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — the cabinet member charged with approving the legality of the Skydance-Warners merger — looked on adoringly. (Miller, the architect of the White House’s bloodthirsty mass deportation offensive, and authoritarian Defense Secretary and Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth were both guests of CBS News at the dinner.)

This is also why Trump – an undeniable master at manipulating the inert tropes of the Beltway consensus when it is in his interest – has called on the nation to heal itself by entering into the self-congratulatory spirit of the dinner elites:

We must, we must resolve our differences. I will say you had Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Conservatives, Liberals and Progressives. These words may be interchangeable, but perhaps they are not. But yet, everyone in that room, a big crowd, a record crowd, there was a record group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I looked and I looked and I was very, very impressed by it.

In such moments, we are once again invited to indulge in the fantasy of a Trumpian “pivot” to sober and responsible statecraft – and to forget the political history of the past decade, during which he incited crowds to gather threats against members of the press and protesters in attendance. Contrary to the pivotal frame still espoused by commentators, Trump continued to attack “fake news” throughout his 2024 campaign, having served a full term and led a failed coup attempt to maintain himself in power. Even as he appealed to the Beltway gods of civility this weekend, he also found time to note ruefully that he had planned to once again take on the media’s alleged thoughtcrimes from the podium of the Correspondents’ Dinner. “I was really going to tear it up last night… But I didn’t get the chance to do it. I probably would have been better off if I didn’t. I don’t know.”

Not surprisingly, Trump requested that the dinner be postponed. “Tell them to start and we should start again within 30 days,” he said in a statement. 60 minutes interview. “It’s not that I want to go. I’m very busy, I don’t need this. But I think it’s very important that we start again.” Here’s another idea: end the whole depraved spectacle of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and begin the long, slow road back to a national political press that does its job the way adults do.