'This can't be real'

July 29, 2026

Jul 29, 2026

Gate at Hole in the Wall Ranch, south of Barnum, Wyoming

The soul-ripping genuflections of the White House correspondents’ dinner

As with most people who make mistakes I try to learn from each; not just to become smarter but to avoid the inner crush of shame and regret that comes with the most embarrassing of the lot.

One mistake I made a generation ago was to buy a ticket to see the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Great film, no doubt—winning five Academy Awards including Oscars for Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. But it was too disturbing for my nature—i.e. the scene where the preternaturally remorseless Hannibal Lecter, played by Hopkins, unabashedly informs Foster’s character that his cannibalism (whose details I’ll omit) came with a side dish of fava beans and “a nice chianti.”

I wish I could unsee and unhear that.

But I learned from it. Be careful about what you expose yourself to.

Which is why I didn’t tune in Friday night to watch the White House Correspondents Association dinner (always carried live by C-SPAN) from the the nation’s capital. I knew it would be traumatizing. Trump would be there. He would hold court for over an hour. He would use the platform to threaten, mock, and insult reporters for their work—work that is invaluable and especially so, now, against the tide of cruelties (i.e. ICE raids targeting non-caucasian immigrants) and authoritarianism that Trump and his enablers daily deliver, from coast-to-coast.

The people Trump attacked would be civil, in response, and many of them would affect to be respectful, despite him having labeled them “the enemy of the people” and “dishonest scum.” It wouldn’t be something I could bear by looking at directly. I would be curious enough to be interested in how it went down. But I would need something like those special sunglasses you’re supposed to wear to protect your retinas when you try to observe a solar eclipse. More on that in a minute.

Journalists have been the foils for Trump for a decade now. Privately he craves reporters’ attention—just ask Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, who’s covered Trump for over a quarter century. He often refers to her as “Maggot” Haberman in his social media posts. Yet he continues to grant her interview requests as a way to solidify his self-importance, to show that even the New York Times has to listen and write down what he says. She steels herself for this, as if it’s as ordinary as cleaning the cat box.

PJammers drum corps at the Martin Luther King Jr., parade in Spokane, January 2026

Trump targets and disparages reporters who don’t fawn over him. In 2015 he infamously mocked the disability of Haberman’s New York Times colleague Serge Kovaleski (who endures a congenital condition affecting the movements of his joints) at a campaign event in South Carolina. Before Trump ran for president it was the sort of behavior that would be disqualifying. But scores of Trump supporters thought his slurred-speech impersonation of Kovaleski’s disability was funny. They hooted along with it because, you know—the press is the enemy of the people and (to once again quote Adam Serwer) the cruelty is the point.

Plus Trump is special, witness his observation at a campaign event in Iowa (January 2016) that his supporters were so devoted to him that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone without it costing him a single vote.

More often than not the journalists he scolds and tries to humiliate are women. It is misogyny, on steroids. There were a score of surreal moments during the event Friday night. One of them was when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer—who announced the journalism awards at the event—gave a short, unflinching speech before presenting a team of Wall Street Journal reporters the inaugural Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability. As Blitzer described (standing just a few feet away from Trump) the prestigious award was for their work revealing the depth of Trump’s friendship with the notorious sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

You may remember that a key piece of evidence presented by the Journal was a large, lewd birthday card featuring the torso of a nude woman with Trump’s signature scrawled in the space where pubic hair would otherwise be. Gross would be one word for it.

Trump denies the card and the signature is his and has filed a $10 billion dollar defamation suit against the paper, that one judge has already dismissed. Moreover, as Blitzer also made note of, Trump’s legal team disclosed the home address of reporter Khadeeja Safdar, causing her and her family to relocate for their safety. Trump’s response was to make light of the moment, smiling and raising his hands into a “what-am-I-supposed-to-do” gesture toward the audience. In surreal fashion, this was followed by the members of the Journal team shaking Blitzer’s and Trump’s hands as they walked over to receive their awards. They all smiled when they shook hands with the president who readily refers to them as human scum.

I know this not because I watched C-SPAN last Friday night but because I caught Jon Stewart Monday night as he hosted The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

He spent the first half of the show unpacking Trump’s meandering and bitter speech at the correspondents’ dinner. Even with Stewart’s skills as curator, it was hard to watch, including the cutaways showing a stone-faced audience, in which many of the unsmiling faces were part of Trump’s entourage. Trump knew he was bombing from the lack of laughter. He blamed the stony silence on speechwriters.