Why Is the Press Corps Throwing Trump a Party — When He's Going After Reporters' Families?

Trump will take the podium at the press corps’ celebration of the First Amendment days after America learned his Justice Department went after reporters’ families.

Somewhere in Manhattan, a federal judge is weighing whether the Justice Department can enforce subpoenas seeking the phone records of New York Times reporters and their relatives. This Friday night, a couple hundred miles south, the president who oversees that very Justice Department will take the podium at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner while the press corps, in black tie, toasts the First Amendment.

Those two rooms are the same story, but only one of them is being honest about it.

The New York Times reported that the Qatari plane Donald Trump insists on flying cannot adequately protect him, that it lacks the missile defenses Air Force One is supposed to carry. It is a legitimate national security story, and the government’s response came in two waves.

First, grand jury subpoenas were delivered to the reporters in person. One got a call from an FBI agent already standing in front of his house. Another came home to find his wife and kids playing in the yard and an unmarked car parked across the street. A third heard his son shout from the front window, “they’re here.” Then came the second wave, quieter, aimed at the phone companies: demands for records, including numbers belonging to the reporters’ relatives. One of those numbers belonged to a reporter’s mother.

If this feels like deja vu, it’s because federal agents executed a search warrant at Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson‘s home in January and carried her electronics out the door. The pattern is neither subtle nor First Amendment-ey.

So Trump’s DOJ went through the reporters and their families looking for the people who explained why the president’s plane could not adequately protect him. The president’s answer, for what it’s worth, was to schedule the plane for the upgrades the story insisted it needed. “Maxed out,” in his words.

Of course the press corps knows all of this, which is what makes Friday remarkable. More than five hundred journalists, mainly retired, along with eight press freedom organizations, signed a letter asking the correspondents’ association to say plainly, with the whole room watching, that press freedom is not a partisan issue. The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) answered the way institutions do, by providing a schedule. The dinner will proceed, and Trump will get the microphone. He’s already mused publicly about whether he will repeat the “rather nasty statements” he made the last time he was planned to speak, when didn’t happen.

Worth remembering why this dinner has been rescheduled for July. The original date in late April was cut short by an assassination attempt, and the WHCA rescheduled it as a laudable statement that violence would not intimidate the press. Yet it reconvenes to hand its platform to a president whose administration is using federal power to intimidate reporters.

The oversimplified and lazy conclusion is that everyone in the ballroom is a coward, and if that is where you land watching this week, I get it, because I see that argument myself. Toasting press freedom while the government subpoenas your colleagues’ family phone records is bullshit, and everybody in that room knows it.

But the truth is both more complex and damning than cowardice. Plenty of the people at those tables signed the letter, and plenty of them have done braver work this year than most institutions ever ask of anyone. The problem sits above them. The real reason the WHCA largely exists is to distribute the commodities Washington journalism actually runs on: access and proximity. An institution built on that economic relationship has little recourse when the man at the center of that dynamic turns on it. You cannot ask the access business to burn its most valuable bridge.

So to repeat the headline question: Why is the press corps feting a president whose DOJ is attacking them? Well, that actually gets it backward. Trump isn’t crashing THEIR party. He IS the party. The subpoenas just put in writing what the black ties, red carpet and seating charts have revealed for decades. The source holds all the power, and the journalists arrange the room around him.

The WHCA insists its press corps cannot defend journalism and refuse to engage the president, and they are absolutely right about that. Covering a president requires White House and presidential access. But it does not require building him a stage and giving the guy (who least needs more attention) the microphone.

Over the past decade, this dinner gets defended as a celebration of journalism rather than a celebration of access, and every year the distinction holds just well enough to get everyone through dessert. But that argument will not hold Friday. The TV cameras will cover the room, the gowns, the dais.

What they may will probably not find is anyone at that podium mentioning the mother whose phone records the government tried to take, or asking the president why it wanted them. I would be delighted to be wrong on that, but the press corps built Trump a stage and handed him the microphone. Confronting him in his venue seems unlikely.

Whether anyone who takes that microphone tells him, to his face, what his government did is the only part of the evening worth watching.