When President Trump makes his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night, he will be addressing a roomful of people he spent the week attacking. Of all the moments for him to be socializing with the journalists who cover him, this one in particular makes for especially discordant timing.
Hardly a week goes by that Mr. Trump does not let loose on the news media, but even measured against his own standards, his attacks in the five days leading up to the dinner were vituperative and verbose. There’s no mystery why. He explains it himself. As his war with Iran beats on, his frustration with how it’s been covered has crescendoed.
“I’m winning a War, BY A LOT,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday. But, “if you read the Fake News,” he said, “you would actually think we are losing the War.”
That cri de coeur turned out to be an amuse-bouche. The rest of the week brought with it hundreds and hundreds of words from the commander in chief, all aimed at what he characterized a moronic and corrupt news media working as one against him. Here are some of the things he said this week about the institutions being celebrated at the black-tie dinner at which he will appear with his wife on Saturday:
“THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS LOST ITS WAY!” he wrote on Tuesday. “No longer required reading,” he declared, “just another failing political ‘RAG!’” He inveighed against his frenemy Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owns that broadsheet.
Mr. Trump had plenty of words to say about The New York Times this week, none of them nice. As for the Washington Post? “Now almost defunct, fortunately,” he wrote on Monday.
That characterization came in a post about what he called “the Anti-America fake News Media” that “is rooting for Iran to win.”
In the president’s telling, those who produce these reports and others like them are “unpatriotic people,” as he put it in one of his posts. So then why show up to a dinner honoring their work?
“I know the President is very much looking forward to it,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on the White House driveway Friday afternoon.
It would be his first time attending as president, she pointed out. “His speech will be very entertaining, that is what I will tell you,” she said happily. “So everyone should tune in!”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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