Bluesky

This weekend’s assassination attempt targeting members of the Trump administration has provoked the now-standard suite of responses to outbreaks of political violence: the rush to detect rigid partisan motivations in an otherwise messy and meaning-challenged act; the bad-faith demands to suppress political speech; the high-formalist calls for national unity from on high.

These formulaic set pieces in recrimination theater are the means by which the country’s national discourse sidesteps the traumas of political violence, and lets the actual conditions that foment political terror remain intact. Yet this latest episode at least offers a path to one meaningful response. If milksop and insincere appeals to civility and common purpose won’t arrest the country’s drift into ever deeper currents of politically minded mayhem, we can at least start to close down our nation’s cottage industry in bogus civility. It’s long past time to mothball, one and for all, the backdrop for this latest assassination attempt: the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Cole Thomas Allen, the alleged assassin, likely just seized on the Correspondents Dinner as a venue with comparatively porous security. Indeed, in the message about his plan to target senior Trump officials, he marveled at how easy it was to conceal his cache of firearms and knives during his stay at the DC hotel that hosts the dinner—known in town as “the Hinckley Hilton,” since it was also the site of the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. Yet while the event furnished a comparatively obliging target of opportunity, it also undergirds 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 chummy equal partners in the management of the polity.

This fable is immensely flattering to members of the Beltway press, who eagerly throng to the spectacle of the WHCD as ready validation of their civic and cultural clout. It’s why the sick exercise of elite news outlets frantically recruiting A-list celebrities to sit at their tables at the dinner has become the chief source of breathless gossip and speculation in an otherwise tsarist-grade show of journalistic prostration before power. It’s why, for months prior to the event itself, the nominally adult members of the Washington press corps manically call in favors and issue desperate smartphone appeals to be granted entry into this or that lavishly appointed afterparty, convened at an embassy or a Bloomberg-leased nightspot, so they can continue to be seen rubbing elbows, and spilling drinks, with the nation’s power elite and celebrity class.

The phoned-in rationale for the whole thing has always been that it’s an opportunity to deepen the (already corrupt) practice of access journalism by permitting reporters and government sources to lay aside their structural divergence of interests for an evening and relish each other’s well-lubricated company. But for this alibi to hold water, someone somewhere should by now be able to point to a concrete scoop or productive thaw in press-government relations that issued from all the schmoozing. I’ve lived in Washington for a quarter century, and amid all the secrets, whisper campaigns, and speculations that propel DC journalism, I’ve never heard the faintest suggestion that the Correspondents Dinner served any useful newsgathering purpose.

The Potemkin civility of the Correspondents Dinner and the Beltway punditocracy that embraces it, is in fact all about hierarchy and the boundary-policing of respectable elite opinion. That’s why the security protocols for the event, even in the studiously mythologized years of Barack Obama’s “post-racial” presidency, have followed a blatantly racist logic. It’s why there can be a journalistic atrocity like the pre-dinner party hosted by Skydance CEO David Ellison—who presides over CBS News, and is poised to run CNN as part of his company’s proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The president spoke for an hour there, as Ellison’s handpicked MAGA-enabling CBS News editor in chief 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 adoringly on. (Miller, the architect of the White House’s vicious and bloodthirsty mass deportation offensive, and the Christian nationalist authoritarian Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were both invited guests of CBS News at the dinner.)

It’s also why Trump—an undeniable master of manipulating the inert tropes of Beltway consensus when it’s in his interest to—called for the nation to heal itself by getting into the dinner’s spirit of elite self-congratulation:

We have to, we have to resolve our differences. I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.

In such moments, we’re again invited to indulge the fantasy of a Trumpian “pivot” into sober and responsible statesmanship—and to forget the political history of the past decade, in which he’s goaded rally crowds to menace members of the press and protesters in attendance. Contrary to the pivoting framework always adopted by the commentariat, Trump continued whaling away at the “fake news” establishment throughout his 2024 campaign, after he’d served a full term in office and led a failed coup attempt to hold on to power. Even as he appealed to the Beltway’s household gods of civility this weekend, he also found time to ruefully note that he had planned to lay into the alleged thought crimes of the media yet once more from the Correspondents Dinner podium. “I was really going to rip it last night.… But I didn’t get a chance to do that. Probably I was better off if I didn’t. I don’t know.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump has called for the dinner to be rescheduled. “Tell them to get it going and we should do it again within 30 days,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview. “It’s not that I want to go. I am very busy; I don’t need that. But I think it’s very important that we do it again.” Here’s another idea: Pull the plug on the whole depraved late-imperial spectacle of the White House Correspondents Dinner and start on the long, slow road back to having a national political press that does its job the way grown-ups do.