When the Vatican announced funeral plans for Pope Francis, the timing of the Saturday service eliminated one awkward conflict for President Donald Trump.
The April 26 date meant that his decision not to attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was, for better or worse, a moot point.
Unlike every other president over the last century, Trump has eschewed the annual black tie confab, ostensibly meant as a fundraiser for scholarships for promising young journalism students, but which in practice serves as the culmination of a week of celebrity-studded parties, receptions and social events that are often derided and mocked as examples of the incestuous swamp that is Washington.
Trump’s absence from the dinner isn’t new — during his first term, he broke the longstanding tradition of having the president sit at the head table in the Washington Hilton’s cavernous ballroom. He’s also had bad experiences with the dinner before he entered the White House, such as when Barack Obama and Seth Meyers mocked him during the 2011 dinner after Trump had spent months questioning whether Obama was born in the United States as he teased the press about a 2012 presidential run.
That’s not to say he wasn’t welcome.
Each year, the president of the White House Correspondents Association invites the President of the United States. And reporters who cover the White House extend invitations to White House staff and officials from across the administration. The idea is to build relationships and trust between the incumbent administration and the press corps, but it often looks like the supposedly adversarial relationship between the president and the press is all just for show.
It’s not going so well this year.
Since returning to the White House, Trump and his aides have upended many aspects of how we go about our jobs.
In February, the White House took control of the “press pool” — the daily rotation of journalists who follow the president everywhere he goes and ask him questions in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One or anywhere else he might be.
The administration has essentially banned the Associated Press, the world’s oldest newswire service, from being in that small group because the outlet refuses to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump gave it at the start of his new term, the Gulf of America.
Trump is suing or has sued numerous news outlets on dubious grounds and is exerting pressure on them to soften their coverage of him lest they lose broadcast licenses or their parent companies lose government contracts.
And in the view of some, his decision not to attend the dinner is seen as yet another slap in the face — the latest in a long line of Trumpian insults to the news media.
I’m not usually one to offer opinions, but that’s a load of crap.
At its core, the entire reason for this insufferable, widely-mocked ritual of official Washington has nothing to do with whether the president sits down for what’s usually an utterly forgettable hotel ballroom dinner, only for the press to fake-laugh at jokes he didn’t even write during the roast.
It’s about celebrating the fact that this country has built into its founding document the right to have a free press that can report critically on the leaders of the day.
It’s about honoring the winners of the association’s awards for the best reporting on the president over the previous year — and about celebrating the next generation of journalists, the scholarship winners who are some of the brightest, most promising young people I have ever met.
If anything, the president not being there makes all of that easier. The president being at the head of the table means we have to be on our best behavior and play nice with the person whom we are supposed to hold accountable. With the president at the Vatican, we can focus on celebrating our colleagues, having a few drinks and taking a brief reprieve from the firehose of news the Trump White House sprays in our face.
