Mr. President, come out of your safe space
Dear President Donald Trump:
As a mainstream media worker, I congratulate you on the completion of your first 100 days as president without facing impeachment.
I also want you to know that we’re on to you. You’re not fooling anybody with your media-bashing act, even after you cranked it up by skipping the annual dinner of White House press corps in Washington to lead yet another campaign rally, in a farm expo center in Harrisburg, Pa.
Sir, has anyone told you that you can stop campaigning now? That you won? That it is time to start governing?
Ah, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? You’d rather return to your comfort zone, where you can be cheered by crowds of people who already support you, than reach out as most presidents do to win new supporters or at least ease tensions with your opposition.
There in your safe space you were free to rail once again at the “failing New York Times” (which actually is doing quite well, thank you) or the “fake news” at CNN and MSNBC, among other media that — unlike, say, Fox News or Breitbart — are not your favorites.
It is obvious that you prefer to politic from a platform of appropriated victimization. Sure, your party controls both houses of Congress and most state legislatures, but you don’t let that keep you from sounding like a lonely warrior fighting for the “forgotten Americans” against — who else? — the media, whom you once again called “very dishonest people.”
Yet when you wanted to get your message out that you were planning to run for president, whom did you call but Maggie Haberman at the Times, who has covered you since your younger days when you would call the city’s tabloids to give your spin on your latest divorce or offload blame for a financial loss.
Those good old days came to mind when your health care repeal-and-replace bill collapsed in the House. You called Robert Costa at the Washington Post and Haberman at the Times before giving remarks to a larger pool of reporters. In those calls you shifted blame to Democrats for the bill’s failure, ignoring the Republicans who control both houses.
No wonder you love to bash the media. Besides the courts, the nation’s free press is the only major institution left that you or your party doesn’t control. When it’s time to shift blame, where else can you go?
That’s as good — or bad — of a reason as any to explain why you skipped the annual dinner of the 103-year-old White House Correspondents’ Association, the first president to do so since Ronald Reagan, who had a good excuse. He had just been shot the previous month in a failed assassination attempt. Your shyness was odd, considering how, as the Times’ Glenn Thrush noted, your “free-ranging press conferences” have been “a lot more democratic” than President Barack Obama’s tightly controlled face-offs — with their single-page lists of pre-selected reporters.
But, after watching you at New York’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in October, I can see why you wanted to shy away from the black-tie correspondents’ dinner — as well as the annual white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club, Washington’s oldest media organization, a month earlier.
At the white-tie Smith dinner, your good-natured verbal jousts with your Democratic rival Hillary Clinton kept with the dinner’s tradition but soured as your remarks turned nasty enough to elicit boos from the audience.
After a couple of decades of watching presidents from both parties deliver funny speeches at the city’s spring press dinners, I have to borrow one of your favorite Twitter words to describe your absence: sad.
It’s not that we who attended the correspondents’ dinner didn’t have a good time without you. We did. But it’s a sad commentary on our times that our president would rather drive more wedges between the media and the audiences that we serve than to take some time to strengthen his own relationship with us.