When Trump knows enough to stay home
The White House Correspondents Dinner is one of the most repulsive social events in Washington. And you should go once, if you get the chance. You are packed like sardines into the 1950s-style basement ballroom of the “Hinckley” Hilton (where Ronald Reagan was shot), eating hotel-banquet food and trying to be heard above the din, while the person you’re talking to looks over your shoulder for someone more important.
He skipped a party. It was a good step
This occasion brings out the worst in the Washington press corps. The official purpose of the dinner is to promote First Amendment values by awarding scholarships. A semiofficial purpose is creating an opportunity for too many people to take their First Amendment values out for an excessively long walk.
The ostensible nonofficial purpose of the dinner is to impress the bosses by sponsoring the biggest big shot. (“We had Hitler at our table. He’ll give us an interview now for sure.”) The actual purpose is to show the world that journalists can clean up pretty good.
Things started getting out of hand in 1987, when a reporter named Michael Kelly (later editor of The Atlantic who, sadly, was killed in 2003 while covering the war in Iraq) brought as his guest Fawn Hall. She’s the woman who, as secretary to Lt. Col. Oliver North, said she helped him throw a “shredding party” to destroy evidence during the Iran-contra scandal.
Soon enough, the competition for guests shifted from snaring the hot deputy assistant secretary to snaring the hot secretary. Hollywood got interested and started sending actors, then genuine movie stars. After-parties sprouted up. Then before-parties. The editor of Vanity Fair (and my boss), Graydon Carter, who is a genius at this sort of thing, started throwing a during-party, like the one he has made famous at the Oscars. Suddenly the cool thing was not to be at the main event, because that meant you hadn’t been invited to the sideshow.
Doors within doors. Parties within parties. The entire northwest quadrant of Washington clouded over with status anxiety. Soon this dinner gobbled up a whole spring weekend. People pretended that they went to these parties only under duress of some sort.
Then came Donald Trump. The president announced in February that he would not be attending: the first president to skip this event in more than 30 years. Even before that, the air was going out of the balloon. Vanity Fair said it was not giving either of its parties, the small one for 50 or so or the large one for the huddled elite of hundreds. Bloomberg canceled an event, as did The New Yorker. Movie star sightings were few (and often wrong).
The New York Times described the dinner as “a Washington tradition symbolizing comity between the president and the press.”
But of course there is no comity between the press and a president who has called the media “the enemy of the American people.” Comity implies mutual admiration, or at least mutual respect. What we have now is more like mutual contempt, which can be healthy too — up to a point.
More recently, in that irritating way of his, Trump has casually said that next year he will go to the dinner. He should go while he’s president. Once. He’ll get the idea.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist at Vanity Fair and author of “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide.”