Journalists court criticism when they fail to ask subjects of their reporting for comment. Shirish Dáte, a White House reporter for the progressive news site HuffPost, appears to have the opposite problem: He gets clobbered when he does reach out.
Top Trump officials, Mr. Dáte said, tend to reply with insults, often bundled with praise for their boss. Never were they more newsworthy than a recent back-and-forth that spread across the internet.
After President Trump said he would meet with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in Budapest, Mr. Dáte (pronounced dah-tay) asked who had recommended the Hungarian capital for a high-stakes meeting.
“Your mom did,” texted Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, in an exchange that she later posted online. “Your mom,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, texted moments later, invoking a well-worn maternal insult that, according to the Urban Dictionary, is the “most versatile dis/comeback ever created in the history of your mom.”
“I was kind of like, this is a serious war that’s going on that has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians in their homes,” Mr. Dáte, 61 — who worked at several mainstream outlets before joining HuffPost in 2016 — said in an interview. “And then your response is, ‘Your mom’?”
Mr. Trump and his aides have regularly bad-mouthed the press and many journalists over the years, turning to disparaging terms like nasty, dying, disgusting and fake. They show less restraint in their pushback against Mr. Dáte, accentuating his somewhat lonely professional existence — reporting for a progressive publication in a building increasingly populated by right-wing outlets supportive of the current administration.
HuffPost has a seat in the White House briefing room and participates in a rotation of journalists covering Mr. Trump’s events. Invective from officialdom seems to come with those privileges. After the flare-up over the Budapest question, for example, Ms. Leavitt told Mr. Dáte via text that he was a “far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face.”
As he reported on a story this fall about Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Trump’s top aides, Mr. Dáte received an expletive-laden text from Mr. Cheung chiding his physical stature and his masculinity, according to a text chain Mr. Dáte provided.
“In nine years, have I ever insulted you?” Mr. Dáte responded. Mr. Cheung then wrote that Mr. Dáte was “being a moron.”
Years of covering national politics, Florida politics, local politics, and cops and crime failed to prepare Mr. Dáte for the kind of language he finds on his mobile screen these days.
“Things got testy at times with Jeb Bush’s staff,” Mr. Dáte said. “But never like this.”
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mr. Dáte, who writes under the byline S.V. Dáte, was born in Pune, India, and came to the United States as a toddler. Both his parents were doctors, so he felt like a “heretic” for choosing a career in the news. Like many journalists of his generation, Mr. Dáte got his start writing for a thriving local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y. In an X thread responding to Ms. Leavitt’s “your mom” put-down, he reminisced about taking collect calls from inmates at the county jail in Goshen, N.Y.
Ambition took him to Florida and a beat covering Daytona Beach for The Orlando Sentinel and then statehouse coverage for The Associated Press and The Palm Beach Post. Then he moved to Washington, though circuitously: He packed his family into a 44-foot sailboat for a two-and-a-half-year trans-Atlantic odyssey funded by proceeds from novels that he had written.
It wasn’t a frustration with establishment media that drove Mr. Dáte to HuffPost. He just needed a job after a stint at The National Journal.
He relies on old-fashioned reporting such as phone calls and documents for his coverage, but he also imbues his work with a progressive worldview.
HuffPost’s editorial approach has accorded Mr. Dáte generous latitude in choosing where to focus his reporting. Mr. Dáte has chosen Mr. Trump. During the Biden administration, Mr. Dáte blanketed the then-former president’s legal troubles and documented the sprawling aftermath of Jan. 6, as opposed to plotting the daily grind of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s term or going deep on concerns about his faculties.
“That was my choice,” said Mr. Dáte, who in May wrote an opinion piece arguing that the media scandal of the 2024 presidential campaign related not to coverage of Mr. Biden’s age, but to “normalizing” coverage of Mr. Trump.
Kevin Robillard, HuffPost’s political editor, says Mr. Dáte is “alarmed” by Mr. Trump not because he’s a Republican, but rather because his actions “are breaks from precedent and oftentimes massive shifts in how this president is operating.”
HuffPost’s leadership has shrugged off the pushback from the administration, including the most recent dust-up. “Their response to Shirish was ridiculous, but it doesn’t bother us,” said Whitney Snyder, HuffPost’s editor in chief. “Maybe he’s gotten under their skin.”
Setting off White House officials delivers some upside for a left-of-center outfit like HuffPost, which has an editorial staff of more than 100 journalists. The site used “your mom” to promote its membership program, which accepts contributions from readers. (Access to the site is free.) “MAGA Makes ‘Your Mom’ Jokes. We Make Headlines,” read a pitch that appeared on HuffPost. “Serious questions deserve better than middle school humor.”
On Tuesday last week, after Ms. Leavitt posted the “Your mom did” exchange with Mr. Dáte on X, the site received 66 percent more revenue for the program than it does on a typical day, according to a spokeswoman for the site.
“I would guess that our core audience does not like Donald Trump for a variety of reasons,” Mr. Dáte said, “and I hope my stories have informed them as to why they might oppose him.”
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