Readers - I always write about reproductive healthcare and bodily autonomy issues. But since my first summer job as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in a small town outside of Toronto - I’ve been a journalist. And as a journalist who really, really cares about democracy and the necessity of a free press, I felt like I would explode when I heard that the White House Correspondents Association of journalists invited Donald Trump as the guest of honor at their annual dinner - wait what? I’m on the Board of the Media and Democracy Project and so I wrote this for their Substack. I’m posting it here for all of you too. Let me know your thoughts!
Why participate in your own execution?
That is the question that has to be asked of every member of the White House press corps and their editors, as they willingly prepare to participate in the rescheduled White House Correspondents Dinner this coming Thursday, July 23rd.
Remember, the original 2026 Correspondents Dinner was underway on April 25 but ended abruptly after a gunman entered the Washington Hilton hotel where it was being held, in a possible attempt to assassinate Donald Trump.
Terrified journalists had to dive under tables as shots were fired on the floor below – and then scramble to report on the intrusion – as Trump was whisked away pronto.
Trump was sitting on the dais because he was being honored at the dinner and was to deliver a speech to the packed room of 2,600 journalists who cover Washington DC politics.
Yes, you read that right.
Donald Trump, who has viciously disparaged the press and has worked assiduously to destroy the credibility of fact-based American journalism ever since his presidential campaign in 2015, was the guest of honor at the black tie event.
He is openly at war with every concept embedded in the First Amendment - especially freedom of the press. Why he was being honored in the first place was questionable beyond belief.
Trump boycotted the White House Correspondents Dinner throughout his first presidency and again last year.
The only reason he deigned to attend in April was because the organization offered to ‘honor’ him and agreed not to have a comedic host who would ‘roast’ him lightly, as every other American president before him managed to contend with graciously.
President John F. Kennedy went far beyond that graciousness and opened a historic door when at the urging of renowned DC journalist Helen Thomas, he refused to attend the dinner until the White House Correspondents Association dropped its ban on women attending the event.
One would expect that with almost three months to reconsider the original invitation to this president, and with Trump’s Department of Justice issuing subpoenas to five New York Times reporters on July 11, that the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) might have made the righteous decision to withdraw their self-destructive invitation to ‘honor’ him.
Some legacy media journalists deceived themselves, thinking that by wearing buttons and pocket squares in their breast pockets, printed with a portion of the First Amendment, that they would be making a protest statement at the original April dinner.
But that small gesture was absurd considering they had been noticeably disinterested in the daily shredding of the First Amendment by Trump and his Department of Justice - “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The recent subpoenas of reporters at the NY Times- and subpoenas for the phone records of their relatives - were an effort by Trump to intimidate the reporters after they reported on missing security features on Trump’s Qatari Force One.
His efforts to force them to reveal their sources on the information, were a major escalation in Trump’s war on freedom of the press and they are straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
On top of the alarming subpoenas, consider all the other worthy reasons that the White House Correspondents Association had to NOT reschedule the masochistic dinner.
WHY ARE THEY TOLERATING TRUMP CALLING FEMALE REPORTERS - ‘PIGGY’?
Did the WHCA really need to subject its members to listening to a speech by a president who has insulted multiple female journalists including Kaitlan Collins of CNN, Rachel Scott of ABC News, Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg, Katie Rogers of the New York Times, and Nancy Cordes of CBS News.
He has called them ‘stupid’, ‘piggy’, ‘ugly’, ‘nasty’, ‘obnoxious’ and ‘third rate’. Normalizing and forgiving this misogyny as the price of doing business and of access to the administration is an insult to all women journalists and by extension, all American women.
Or the WHCA might have reconsidered subjecting the Washington press corps to a president who has trash talked a majority of them as “fake news’, has banned prominent news outlets like AP News from his press conferences, attempted to pull the broadcast licenses of media companies, has used mainstream TV news interviews to let loose a firehose of lies, and who has shaken down ABC News and CBS News for multi-million dollar settlements for frivolous lawsuits.
The White House Correspondents Association was created in 1914 to fight for full access to news coming out of the White House and to report vigorously on the presidency. That is exactly what Trump has set out to prevent - vigorous reporting on himself, his presidency, and his entire administration.
He has supported his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on all fact-based media from the Pentagon unless they have a Pentagon escort. Journalists are no longer allowed in the Pentagon’s press office, which they occupied for decades under former administrations of both parties.
As part of his purposeful and wildly successful campaign to sow distrust in the reality - based mainstream media, Trump has chillingly labeled journalists as “enemies of the people”.
Trump borrowed that phrase from the bloodthirsty Russian dictator Joseph Stalin who purged every one of his millions of perceived political enemies by murdering and imprisoning Russians in the 1930s.
Let’s step back for a moment and get perspective.
In light of Donald Trump’s war against the media professionals who cover the White House and all national politics, is there any justifiable reason for him to be invited to be the guest of honor at the WHC Dinner?
“You take the writer and/or the publisher of the paper … and you say ‘Who is the leaker? National security,’” Trump explained to audiences during a rally in Robstown, Texas. “And they say ‘We’re not gonna tell you.’ They say ‘That’s OK, you’re going to jail.’ And when this person realizes he’s going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly, he will say ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that leaker is!’”
Donald J. Trump 10/23/2022
The ruthlessness of his campaign against truth in the news media has been so successful that only 31% of Americans now trust that it reports events fairly or accurately. For Republicans, it’s only 8%.
This is an all-time low.
So could the fact that the White House Correspondents Association’s president right now is CBS News’s Weija Jiang, have anything to do with the invitation?
CBS News is of course now owned by mega billionaire David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and a personal friend of the President, who donated $45 million to a non-profit backing Trump’s 2024 election campaign.
Its news division is now led by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss who has been actively degrading in its news presentation to ensure that it is more Trump- and MAGA-aligned. Weiss has decimated the leadership and the ranks of highly regarded correspondents at the network’s crown jewel - 60 Minutes. Backed by David Ellison, Weiss fired 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondents Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega.
Rescheduling the White House Correspondents Dinner after the purge of talent at CBS News is an insult to those axed journalists who devoted their careers to the presentation of vigorous reporting for the network’s viewers.
Then let’s not forget that Jim Acosta and Don Lemon were forced out of CNN, Terry Moran fired from ABC News, and Scott Macfarlane and John Dickerson pushed out the door at CBS News as a result of Trump’s unrelenting pressure on broadcast TV networks to bend the knee to him with more favorable coverage whether it’s reality-based or not.
If we accept that the White House Correspondent’s Association’s leadership by Weija Jiang could be a factor in Trump being named the honoree of the 2026 dinner, there is still the bigger question.
WHY WOULD YOU HONOR THE MAN WHO WANTS TO DESTROY YOU?
Why did those 2,600 ‘enemies of the people’ get dolled up in their fancy gowns and tuxedos and actually attend the dinner on April 25th?
Why did they feel compelled to be led like lambs to the slaughter?
They had to know that Trump must have felt exhilarated knowing that he had insulted and degraded them, had lied to them, walked out of their interviews, subpoenaed them and yet he was still invited to be venerated by them - his victims.
Trump understood his ‘victims’ well.
He knew that they would show up, gossip amongst themselves, and sit at their dinner tables and take whatever ugly new insults he would dish out in his speech.
He knew that they would feel compelled to be there because their colleagues and competitors would all be there. His ‘enemies of the people’ would tell themselves that they needed to put in appearances in order to ‘work’ their Trump news sources or make new sources.
And he was right. They are a pack of sheep and he has proven that he can control the press pack - in service to their corporate and oligarch media bosses.
They have never walked out of his news conferences when he humiliates one of their colleagues or even has one of their members thrown from the room,
He knows that they still get squishy on their TV networks or digital sites about actually having to call one of his lies, a lie, in plain language.
WILL THE NY TIMES REPORT ON TRUMP’S PLAN TO BE A DICTATOR NOW?
Even The New York Times, with its 13.1 million subscribers, almost $118 million in profit of the first quarter of 2026, which was up 27% from a year ago, has avoided clearly calling out Trump’s lies, by torturously describing them as statements ‘without evidence’ or as ‘unproven claims’ or as claims ‘without truth.’
The mighty New York Times, which could have been a lion setting an example to the rest of the pack of press lambs, has until now refused to take on that role.
The biggest story today in American news - the biggest since the Civil War - is Trump’s plan to destroy democracy and replace it with his own brand of authoritarianism.
The media who are members of the White House Press Association have done an excellent job of not covering that story which is staring at them every day. Instead, some of them take on daily news bits reporting on Trump and his administration’s nonstop abuses and corruption.
They are taking pleasure in covering the historically consequential mid-term elections as a “horse race” not as the possible last stand for American democracy. Who will win the Democratic primaries in Maine and Michigan? Can Dr. Amy Acton beat Republican Vivek Ramaswamy to be governor of Ohio?
But aside from MS NOW anchors like Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Nicole Wallace - none of whom turned up at the first 2026 WHCA Dinner - the majority of the members of the mainstream press appear to have blinders on despite Trump’s threat to their own livelihoods, which depend on democracy and a free press.
That has sadly included the New York Times.
Yes, the New York Times has done much excellent reporting on Trump’s abuses and corruption but it has never specifically called out nor relentlessly covered Trump’s ongoing systematic extermination of American democracy - as one BIG continuing and tied-together story.
And that was a deliberate decision, according to its Executive Editor Joe Kahn.
Kahn himself explained it in an interview about why the Times refused to identify and cover the grave threat that Trump represented, as a major news story leading up to the 2024 election.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?”
The country’s Founders have to be freaking out in their graves when Kahn says that Trump threatening the country’s founding principles, is NOT top news.
After all, they believed that a free press - unafraid to criticize the country’s government and leaders - was so important that they made the protection of the freedom of the press, part of the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The jury is now out on whether Kahn and New York Times owner, A.G. Sulzberger will finally be roused to consider the annihilation of American democracy as the biggest story in the country today, now that their reporters have been subpoenaed to reveal sources.
But the jury will only be out until July 23rd on whether any of the White House press corps - given a chance for second thoughts - will choose to skip the self-sabotaging rescheduled event.
All in attendance should forever be stained with a red-scarlet letter “T” for their compliance and inactions in defense of the Constitution.
One thing I am sure of - the Founding Fathers will be shaking their powdered wigs in heaven over any members of the White House media who do choose to gussy themselves up to go to round two of the White House Correspondents Dinner.
After all, they will be honoring an aspiring king and their would-be executioner.
UPDATE: as of 4 pm ET on July 23rd, a couple of hours before the White House Correspondents Dinner the DOJ withdrew all the subpoenas to the NY Times after a federal judge grilled government lawyers over the handling of the subpoenas. However, the judge said the DOJ could subpoena the reporters again.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.