Donald Trump will be the first president in 36 years to skip out on the White House Correspondents Association annual dinner. There are a lot of reasons to be uncomfortable about the yearly “nerd prom,” which has been held since 1921, but there’s no doubt about why Trump isn’t attending.
It’s not because he thinks the press is “the enemy of the American people.”
It’s not because he might have to sit next to someone who has their byline on a story about his dealings with Russia.
It’s not because the purpose of the event is to raise money for journalism scholarships, and Trump doesn’t want anyone doing real journalism.
Nope. Donald Trump is skipping the event because part of the tradition of the Correspondent’s Dinner is that they hire a comedian to make fun of the president. Donald Trump is not going to expose his delicately thin skin to someone making (horrors) jokes. Imagine if someone told a really funny joke and everyone laughed at Trump, in front of Trump. Gitmo would need a new wing.
The last president not to attend was Ronald Reagan in 1981, but the reason Reagan didn’t make it that year had nothing to do with how he felt about the press, or a fear of stand-up. It was because he was recovering from an assassination attempt. Even so, Reagan called in to the event to make a few jokes of his own.
Because that’s another part of the dinner’s annual tradition. After the president is on the receiving end of a few jokes, he gets to be the source for a few more, usually aiming them at the media. Despite his frequently repeated hatred for the press Trump won’t do that. He can’t do that. Trump has both no sense of humor and no sense of timing. He’s not about as funny as a heart attack; he’s exactly as funny as a heart attack. If you don’t believe me, check his performance at the Al Smith Dinner.
I hope they hire Samantha Bee and Steven Colbert. Because you know Trump will be watching.
Okay, let’s go read some pundits.
Dana Milbank on the new “conservatism.”
I was there when Trump spoke at that 2011 CPAC gathering, at its former site in the Marriott ballroom in Washington’s Woodley Park neighborhood. Then, as now, Trump was angry. But he didn’t utter a peep that day about immigration or the border wall, terrorism, or Iran or Iraq — the issues that motivate him now.
What made him mad then was gas prices. He had just seen gas selling for $4.54 a gallon. “It’s going to go much higher,” he said, predicting prices of $7 to $9 a gallon. “Believe me, in a year or two from now you’re going to be paying that, as sure as you’re sitting there.”
Which almost seems like one those things someone might have brought up to Mr. I-never-make-mistaeks back during campaign season.
Rewatching the 2011 CPAC video was instructive. … Trump had little interest in conservative ideology then or now, instead exploiting the public passion of the moment.
What’s changed is not Trump but the conservative movement. When he spoke at CPAC in 2011, conservatism was an ideology. By this year’s conference, conservatism had become a collection of grievances. It had become Trumpism.
Actually, Trump just took every piece of the conservative social message and amplified it. It’s conservative fiscal policy that disappeared. Because it never really existed in the first place. After thinking about it for a bit, I’m now writing a couple of thousand words on how Democrats picking up “fiscally conservative” themes was one of the most foolish and destructive decisions ever made. Seriously. Look for it tomorrow.
Nicholas Kristof states the obvious.
Dear Trump Voters,
You’ve been had. President Trump sold you a clunker. Now that he’s in the White House, he’s betraying you — and I’m writing in hopes that you’ll recognize that betrayal and hold him accountable.
Nuh uh. Trump voters still like Trump. It must be true, because every single frickin’ day of the week you can absolutely guarantee that at least one major media outlet will venture to some Midwest county were Trump got 105% of the vote and report the astounding news that people there are still saying “give him more time.” And now, the weather.
Trump spoke to your genuine pain, to the fading of the American dream, and he won your votes. But will he deliver? Please watch his speeches carefully. You’ll notice that he promises outcomes, without explaining how they’ll be achieved. He’s a carnival huckster promising that America will thrive with his snake oil.
“We’re going to win, we’re going to win big, folks,” Trump declared Friday at the CPAC meeting, speaking of his foreign policy.
Great! Problem solved. Next? He then outlined his take on drug trafficking and what will surely be his outcome:
“No good. No good. Going to stop.” Wow! Why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Trump voters were fooled because they want to be fooled. And when they realize that they’ve been taken, don’t count on them taking it out on Trump.
Maria Zuber on attacking coal without attacking coal communities.
As a daughter of coal country, I know the suffering of people whose fates are tied to the price of a ton of coal. But as a scientist, I know that we cannot repeal the laws of physics: When coal burns, it emits more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel. And if we keep emitting this gas into the atmosphere, Earth will continue to heat up, imposing devastating risks on current and future generations. There is no escaping these facts, just as there is no escaping gravity if you step off a ledge.
The move to clean energy is imperative. In the long run, that transition will create more jobs than it destroys. But that is no comfort to families whose livelihoods and communities have collapsed along with the demand for coal. We owe something to the people who do the kind of dangerous and difficult work my grandfathers did so that we can power our modern economy.
Which is great. And Zuber’s great. And all this is absolutely beside the point. Because coal isn’t dying because someone is limiting carbon emissions. Nope. Coal is dying because fracking has made natural gas cheap, and natural gas has numerous advantages over coal. It’s cheaper to transport, easier to store, doesn’t leave behind mountains of ash … and most importantly it’s much, much cheaper to build new power plants using gas. Even when coal was the cheapest fuel by a wide margin, it took decades for that difference in fuel price to pay off. And that margin is just not there any more. Do we need to move to clean energy? Absolutely. But we also need to be honest with miners about where their jobs have gone.
Ron Klain thinks Democrats should grab the “exceptionalism” label.
As Democrats engage in soul-searching about their future, here’s an idea: Progressives should claim one of the oldest ideas in American thought — the concept of American exceptionalism — for their own.
American exceptionalism, the view that the United States’ revolutionary founding, devotion to liberty and natural resources make it a country with a unique role in the world, has traditionally been the province of conservatives, who have tended to add a religious dimension to the mix. Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the “shining city upon a hill” exemplified this conservative embrace.
Klain’s idea—that Trump’s intrinsically selfish policies are the opposite of the exceptionalism Republicans have trumpeted for decades—doesn’t actually fit. Because while the GOP can plagiarize a shining city with the best of them, what they always meant by America’s exceptionalism was that America could go where it wanted, when it wanted, and didn’t have to ask anyone. Because we’re the world’s biggest special snowflake, carrying the world’s biggest stick. Klain is right, we are better than Trump’s vision, but he’s also wrong. Now is not the time to take a hand-me-down phrase from the Republicans that is weighted with hubris and permission to step on the rights of other nations. The GOP is still doing just fine in that area.
Ross Douthat spends his column proposing a liberal employment program, then realizes it and tries to hurt liberals equally with “a proposal to ban pornography and video games.” Because … who knows?. That’s what he thinks liberals are about.
Joel Simon on how Trump’s war on the free press goes beyond US borders.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, President Trump took his anti-media rhetoric to a new level, doubling down on his description of journalists as “the enemy of the people” and calling for an end to the use of anonymous sources. This on a day when his press secretary Sean Spicer barred reporters from The New York Times, BBC, BuzzFeed News, CNN, Politico, The Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post from his daily White House press briefing.
How can they report news if Spicey doesn’t talk to them? They can’t! It’ll just be blank pages. Oh, Trump, this is a perfect plan.
The unrelenting attacks on the news media damage American democracy. They appear to be part of a deliberate strategy to undermine public confidence and trust by sowing confusion and uncertainty about what is true. But they do even greater damage outside the United States, where America’s standing as a global beacon of press freedom is being drastically eroded.
Leonard Pitts on the murder of Trayvon Martin, five years later.
A few words on the innocence of Trayvon Martin.
The very idea will outrage certain people. Experience says the notion of Trayvon Martin being innocent will offend them deeply.
But of course, the last five years is a history of people deciding Trayvon was not innocent, no evidence required.
George Zimmerman was the first to make that reduction when he stalked Trayvon through a gated community despite a police dispatcher advising him to stay with his car. Then the police did it, testing the shooting victim for drugs and alcohol while telling his killer to “go home and get some rest.” Then the jury did it when they set Zimmerman free.
Five years later, people are still inventing things for Trayvon Marin to be guilty of. because … nothing’s changed.
The New York TImes on some people who really do like Trump.
Few profited more immediately from Donald Trump’s election than the private-prison industry. On Nov. 9, the day after Mr. Trump won, the Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic), the nation’s biggest operator of private prisons, saw its stock price jump 43 percent; its leading competitor, the GEO Group, rose 21 percent. Stocks in those companies are up more than 100 percent since Election Day.
If that seemed premature, this is one time the market really did know what was coming.
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions scrapped an order issued last August by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department to phase out the government’s use of private prisons, which increased substantially as exploding prison populations strained the capacity of state and federal facilities in the 1980s. At their peak, privately run prisons housed 30,000 federal inmates, or about 15 percent of the total federal prison population; by this May, they will hold around 14,000.
May’s a long way off. There’s a lot of time for Donald Trump to lock up journalists before then.
Ruth Marcus points out the silliness of Trump’s swipe at transgender rights.
The Trump administration’s move to rescind bathroom access protections for transgender students rests on the idea that school bathroom policies are “a states’ rights issue,” as White House press secretary Sean Spicer has explained, and that, in any event, it is “preposterous on its face” that the authors of the federal law barring sex discrimination in schools imagined it would cover transgender students.
Sure. It couldn’t be that the people who wrote that law wanted to protect everyone.
The states’ rights argument, redolent of 1960s resistance to civil rights protections for African Americans is, to repeat Spicer’s language, “preposterous on its face.” Of course, education is traditionally a state and local issue. But the federal government provides billions of dollars every year to local schools — and attaches a host of conditions to the receipt of that funding. Among those conditions: that they not discriminate on the basis of sex.
Okay, I have two days left to clear out of the house I’ve lived in for the last twenty years and I’m so exhausted my hair aches. So I think that’s it for this APR. Moving. I hate moving.