When the Press Becomes The Story

This past Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner brought together two of the most hated entities in America: Donald Trump and the press.

Over the past decade, these two have committed themselves to the most toxic of relationships. Donald Trump treats the press like shit. The press takes it, thanks him for it, and then asks him for another. They willingly endure the abuse in the name of pageviews and clicks. They admire how "accessible" he is in that he answers questions they shout at him from across the room. They love how he "tells it as it is" and doesn't censor himself with any sort of political correctness. His social media posts have become hourly news stories, giving the press nonstop articles to write at all hours of the day. He is the antithesis of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He's not afraid to call out those he feels wronged by. He frequently insults and shames the women journalists. He is the most vile and uncouth man to ever occupy the Oval Office and sees the press as undermining him at every turn. Our press knows this and yet remains committed to covering him in a way that normalizes the unprecedented criminality and corruption that his administration brings. When history books are written, the press will rightly be seen as a willing accomplice to all the death and destruction that 21st-century Republicans brought onto the world. 

So what happened on Saturday evening should not have surprised anyone. 

Sure, we didn't have a "crazed gunman forcing his way into the hotel" on our bingo cards. But truth be told, we all knew *something* newsworthy would happen at the event. Most of us expected it to be in the form of Trump berating the press. After all, everything Donald Trump or his handlers do is done in a way to maximize the monopoly they have over the media in this country. Trump doesn't decide to finally host the White House Correspondents' Dinner (something every other president since Calvin Coolidge has done) unless he anticipates making news. In this regard, that news would have likely been a fiery speech where he tells a room of journalists to their face that they are worthless and failures at their profession. And, as we've seen over the past decade, the journalists being reprimanded would have taken it all in and thanked Dear Leader for his honest evaluation of their performance.

But instead of this spectacle, we had another. A rush of Secret Service into the event. Vance and Trump (in that order) being whisked away. Armed officers onstage, peering into the distance. Those in the room realizing that this was no drill and cowering under tables, frantically using their phones to try and figure out what was going on. It may have felt longer, but the chaos quickly ended after only a few minutes. Despite Donald Trump wanting the show to go on (for want of recreating his Butler, Pennsylvania moment), cooler heads prevailed, and the event was postponed. Meanwhile, Trump refused to let the attack be about anyone other than himself and scheduled an evening address where his solution to gun violence in America was to *checks notes* build his beloved ballroom. Because even during a time when countless people were traumatized, Donald Trump simply refuses to have a single empathetic bone in his body. That's who he has always been and will always be.

Perhaps most telling has been the aftermath of the event. Trump and his sycophants continue to push for his magical ballroom. Democrats naturally are being asked if their anti-Trump rhetoric is somehow to blame for the actions of a single deranged individual. Like all of these events in the Trump era, we have to wait to learn of the race and immigration status of the alleged shooter before seeing who or what will be blamed for this single individual's actions. But most concerning of all is that we now have a legitimate question as to how this happened: was this a false-flag attack to gin up support for Trump, or was this a severe security lapse that should never have happened?

We've reached a point now where we can no longer answer that question in good faith. And that, right there, shows the damage that our Fourth Estate has incurred over the past decade. In normalizing Donald Trump, they've created a culture where they no longer seek information to questions to which the answers would discredit Donald Trump himself. To this date, we still have questions about what happened in Butler. How did the gunman gain access to the rooftop? What, if anything, caused the marks on Donald Trump's face? How did his ear recover so quickly? Why was he allowed to gesture to the crowd when the threat had yet to be neutralized? And why do we still know so little about the gunman and his motivations? 

When you create the type of culture where these questions go unanswered, you leave the public skeptical, especially in dealing with the most dishonest administration in American history. As Saturday's event was happening in real-time, there was honest skepticism about what was happening. How could the Secret Service again allow a deranged individual to gain entry to an event, this time with both the president and vice-president in attendance? If this person was, in fact, a guest at the hotel, how did he have access to a firearm? How was there such an easy opportunity for him to sprint past guards and past the metal detector? Was he on a guest list for the event, or did he just try to crash it? How did all this happen when Joe Biden and Barack Obama had a combined 12 dinners without a single incident?

These are the questions a working press would pursue. But they won't. Because learning the answers would likely point to the incompetence of the current administration and its security protocols. And our press simply can't have that. They can't document anything that paints the administration in an unflattering light. What happened Saturday night was not what we were expecting. Yet the press's refusal to follow up and ask the hard questions about what happened was entirely predictable. In fact, it's hard to imagine a more apt moment in time than for our very own media to have countless members' lives in harm's way and to be perfectly content to move on from the story within 48 hours. That is the current press corps in a nutshell: a shallow profession that is more than happy to reject real journalism because the result might speak poorly of the current occupant of the Oval Office. 

They and Trump truly deserve each other.