“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him?”
-Michelle Wolf, April 28, 2018
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
-Les Moonves, February 29, 2016, regarding the Donald Trump presidential campaign
By now, a lot of people have offered their opinions on comedian Michelle Wolf’s speech at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. At the risk of coming off like Dennis Miller, I wanted to research some points before giving my opinion.
Wolf was not the first person to give a speech at the WHCD to be taken to task for being vulgar or tasteless, even before the Trump Administration. In fact if you look at the 2016 event and compare President Barack Obama’s speech to the speech given immediately afterward by comedian Larry Wilmore, it’s amazing that the president not only did not punch low, but had a better sense of the room and better comic timing than the professional comic. Since then, you’ve had Hasan Minhaj and Wolf (like Wilmore, both veterans of The Daily Show), and both were attacked for being too offensive. In Wolf’s case, she came off with a hesitant, giggly affect, which conveyed either too much confidence in the material, or conversely no confidence at all.
As Wolf herself said, “you should have done your research.” But nevertheless people felt the need to complain, including those who were not directly targeted by Wolf. So where the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Margaret Talev, had promoted Wolf before the dinner, saying “Our dinner honors the First Amendment and strong, independent journalism. [Wolf’s] embrace of these values and her truth-to-power style make her a great friend to the WHCA”, after the dinner, Talev said: “Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.”
Which is a bit precious given that, again, this is the third year in a row that the Correspondents’ Dinner hired a Comedy Central comic as a featured speaker and they ended up giving an R-rated address. So it is a fair question as to who is more betrayed: the rubber-chicken crowd that expects the event to titillate rather than provoke, or the people who actually expect journalism to speak truth to power.
The real joke of the night is that that never has been the point of the event.
There is a certain code of professional respect in American politics, not just between the two major parties but between the press and the political class, and it is simultaneously the greatest virtue and greatest vice of the system. It has already been permanently undermined within the two-party system by Newt Gingrich, then the Tea Party, and most recently by the maneuvers of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in the Congress to shut Democrats out of serious legislative action. But the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, like the Al Smith Dinner in New York, is one of the remnants of a tradition where all parties in the political-media complex are supposed to relax and reassure themselves that short-term disagreements aside, they’re all Americans on the same team.
The ultimate downside to this sense of courtesy is that if you have enough friendships or juice with the gatekeepers of information, you can be the most depraved character imaginable and still retain respect in the system. As some of Donald Trump’s mentors showed him by example.
I’ve often felt that this is one of the reasons that Trump ran for president in the first place. He was already the ultimate spoiled brat who was used to having the press and the legal system give him all the breaks he wanted, but the least little pushback was still too much for his fragile ego. So he decided to shoot for the ultimate position of power and prestige so that his disgusting conduct would finally be unimpeachable. So to speak.
What we have ended up with is worse than hypocrisy, it’s a double standard. Which is not entirely the same thing.
Hypocrisy is the Republican stock in trade. You expect these people to attack others on standards that they don’t feel the need to uphold themselves.
The problem is when the “respectable” mainstream media actually do believe they uphold standards of fairness and objectivity, but in doing so, enforce them unevenly. What happens when Donald Trump attacks judges and journalists for being Hispanic, or mocks another journalist for a disability? Do you call him out as a bigot? Well, you can’t do that, that would be bias! But if you don’t call a spade a spade, is that fairness to Trump, or bias against truth?
What happens where you have a standard where one party can bully, pick fights and do as they please while everyone else has to play by the rules? When one party gets sucker punched and can only fight with one hand tied behind their back, who wins and who loses on that standard of “fairness”?
This code of professional respect is one of the numerous traditions of American government that Donald Trump wishes to destroy, to the extent that he cares about those traditions at all.
So of course he isn’t going to attend the Correspondents’ Dinner and take (further) mockery. That’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ job.
Sanders, also known as Aunt Lydia, also known as Sister Mary Elephant, is one of the most disingenuous and unpleasant people in an Administration where being disingenuous and unpleasant are the two main resume items. But Wolf didn’t call her out for being overweight, though she could have. She didn’t say Sanders is ugly, though she could have. She did say that Sanders was the white woman’s equivalent of an Uncle Tom, and that she traded in lies to the extent that she had turned them into a facial accessory. Now, one doesn’t normally accuse the press secretary of outright lying, but when this Administration started by having Sean “Spicy” Spicer come up to the press corps and insist that Donald Trump had the best attended inauguration in history when all visual evidence confirmed the opposite, it undermined the “official” Administration’s credibility when attacking anyone else as false or biased. As a more recent example of White House lies, Dr. Harold Bornstein, Trump’s former doctor, just said that Trump’s bodyguard and a “large” assistant raided his office in February 2017 for Trump’s medical records. At her first press conference since the WHCD, Sanders admitted to the seizure on Tuesday but insisted that “as standard operating procedure, the White House Medical Unit took possession of the president’s medical records.” It is NOT standard medical procedure to have the president’s bodyguard take his medical records without authorization from the White House Medical Unit and in violation of HIPAA guidelines. (To the extent that we can trust Dr. Bornstein’s word, so long after the fact.) As it turned out, the raid occurred just two days after Bornstein told the press that he had given Trump a prescription of Propecia for hair loss. So that part wasn’t lying on the part of Sanders so much as omission. The pattern with the White House is to insist that “if Donald Trump says the sky is plaid and the moon is made of green cheese, then it is, because President Trump said so, because he’s the president, because he was elected, and who cares if Hillary got more votes, because he got the Electoral College, so that means the people have spoken, and anybody who disagrees is a Commie Muslim traitor or something.” Sanders is just that much more surly and brazen in that assertion than Spicer. Indeed, towards the end of his tenure, the press corps was starting to feel a bit of sympathy for Spicer because they could detect a core of shame within him, a trait that Sanders has obviously deduced is not conducive to survival in Trumpworld.
Getting roasted by Wolf is of a piece with Sanders’ day to day job. The White House press conference is increasingly recognized as a ritual where the White House spews public-relations propaganda in the guise of truth and the press corps pretends to take it seriously. But everybody puts up with being lied to, and did so long before Trump’s inauguration, because that’s how things are done. Journalism, especially in Washington, is a matter of contacts, and however much contempt the audience has for professional liars like Kellyanne Conway, and however much rage the president has for “leakers,” the government and the press are in a mutually parasitic relationship where most of the best leaks are from people like Conway and even Donald Trump himself. This was confirmed by no less a conservative than Ann Coulter. In her New York Times interview with Frank Bruni, Coulter confirmed that she was the source of a quote in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury expose and that she was not the one who leaked it. In her account to Bruni, she had tried to get Trump’s aides to dissuade him from letting Ivanka and Jared Kushner act in his White House without portfolio, since that sort of thing was bad optics in the Kennedy Administration, and Bobby Kennedy “knew a little more about politics.” She got blown off by people who said “that’s above my pay grade.” So she got an audience with Trump himself and said: “Apparently no one else will tell you this, but you can’t hire your kids.” She said he did listen at the time, but when she heard about Wolff’s book, she went to Wolff at the book party and said, “I didn’t tell you anything, how did you know I had told him this? It had to be the president or someone the president told.’ And he said: ‘Oh, yeah, it was the president. He was storming around the Oval Office, saying, ‘And then Ann Coulter told me ….’”
So both sides here are acting just a little bit in bad faith. And when it is clear that Trump and his team have no regard for How The Game Is Played, it doesn’t necessarily help the press to spread information through deception and unattributed rumor. Only one side needs to care about upholding its reputation.
In any case, it is hardly news for a private citizen to shout that Trump and his stooges are liars and crooks. The real punch of Michelle Wolf’s speech came very late, at the 18-minute mark. “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks, or vodka, or water, or college, or ties, or Eric… but he has helped YOU. He has helped you sell your papers, and your books, and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.”
It’s funny because it’s true.
The American press could have treated Trump on the same mutant-retard level that they usually reserve for third-party candidates. They could have shut him out of debates simply for going beyond the pale, which he did more and more often. But no. They wanted the 2016 election to be a contest. Everybody expected Hillary Clinton to roll to victory (certainly including Clinton), and the press corps that had prior experience of Clinton was already bored to death by the prospect. They could have promoted Rubio, Jeb or Ted Cruz, but they were all sad sacks, and the Annoying Orange was “great for ratings.” And of course, the New York press was at least as chummy with Trump as they were with the Clintons.
You don’t see journalists making a big issue of that bit, but that’s because Washington journalists are professional enough to not call attention to their weaknesses, whereas both Donald Trump and his cult are gaping wounds of emotional neediness that would cause a Jewish Holocaust survivor to go, “stop with the complaining, already.”
But make no mistake, Wolf knew what she was saying with those words, and her targets knew exactly what she was talking about.
And the fact that female professional journalists – some of whom are the prime beneficiaries of White House leaks – are responding to Wolf on a tone-policing, gossip-girl level with regard to Sarah Sanders, rather than addressing the substance of her point, actually calls attention to it by omission.
One demands respect within an institution if that institution is worthy of respect. Thus when one party flagrantly violates the rules of respect they should not complain if they get attacked in kind, not should the respectable gatekeepers pretend that that party is innocent. Otherwise the institution becomes unworthy of the respect everyone is demanding.
And if the press will not challenge the White House, either because it fears a hostile administration, or wants to keep access to a friendly one, that’s part of the problem.
Also – Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have clean drinking water.