HAVING DINNER WITH THE ENEMY
Imagine a dinner given by the ACLU, with Adolf Hitler and George Wallace as principal guests on the dais!
Pretend you’re seeing an Academy Awards Annual Telecast, with Benjamin Netanyahu and Senator Joe McCarthy giving the award for Best Documentary.
Or watching both the Democratic and Republican conventions, with Joseph Goebbels and Vladimir Putin giving heartfelt keynote addresses to both parties.
The White House Correspondents Awards Dinner one-upped those aforementioned comic nightmares:
Instead, and in living color, it presented a leering, smarmy, sleeping, cutesy-pie Trump slouching at the main table, not only mugging for the cameras, but giving “Good job!” handshakes to those very journalists whose work and whose sources were meant to expose the Greatest Evil Hits by the World’s Most Evil AmeriKong!
After the first rifle-shot at the earlier interrupted Correspondents Awards Dinner had been heard around the world, and Trump and Company had been swiftly escorted away from the proceedings, Trump remarked, in this second Awards Dinner, that he had to acknowledge the bravery of three of our nation’s most excellent people: Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and Tom Hogan, “who had stood up and who had remained standing up” after the rifle-shot had been fired.
According to The Bravest Man in America, they did not hide or cringe under the tables, as all the craven journalists did.
I recall an image different from the Bravest Man’s description: Hegseth staggering about, after the rifle-shot, looney-eyed, looking for an exit; Stephen Miller quickly being rushed out by secret servicemen, clutching his pregnant wife in front of him. I don’t remember how Hogan had left, or if he was still holding the FBI’s paper bag, worth fifty grand. I do remember the Secret Service ordering everyone to stay down, and RFK Jr being hustled out, his wife chasing after him.
The same brave trio was present at the Second Dinner, with the Chief American Family Planner, Russ Vought, glumly glaring about him, like a glumly and glaring Robespierre in the Committee Chambers of the French Revolution, before his date with Madame Guillotine.
But no glum glaring for Trump! Pas de tout! His own Favorite Man of the Hour sat on the dais, resembling a weird and hairy overweight rhino, in his overstuffed tux, his personal and professionally radiant Karolyn Leavitt patting his back while the Dinner Hostess, CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, told him, “It’s your job to say things, and our job to push back,” as if she were a brave first grade teacher on the playground during recess, trying to calm the playground bully from pushing over the swings onto the kindergarten class
The WHC Dinner was a study in how a democracy dies.
It normalizes tyranny: by giving itself a Big People Award, with the Tyrant sitting right beside it, doing his usual act, while ICE runs around outside, looking like a B movie serial, with masks and guns and chest pads and badges, ramming cars and hauling brown or black kids from their families, breaking down doors, and shoving brown and black people and Lefties with banners and beards into vans, shooting them or dumping them into “incarceration facilities” that wouldn’t pass an animal inspection test in any American city, or sending them off without a hearing to countries that wouldn’t pass a human decency test in any nation - while Hizzown Self-appointed King of the World throws the Constitution and international law into the garbage-can, and says: “Sue me.”
The journalists of America are normalizing this take-over of two hundred and fifty years of a country struggling to live up to its Constitution’s laws and amendments, and quickly losing it to a tyrant, his billlionaire/trillionaire buddies, and his terrified and laughingly so-called ‘Republicans’ and muddle-headed supporters.
What would I have done, in that situation, at the Second White House Correspondents’ Dinner?
I would have surrounded the building with No King citizens, removed Trump and his minions to Guantanamo, and held a public trial of Trump and every Trumpian, charging them with every law they had ever broken, and demanding the return of all monies stolen by Trump, his family, and his minions, to the public welfare.
I would have held a new election - with no Trumpian ever allowed to run for office.
There is no room for “journalistic objectivity” here.
There is no such thing.
I would not want to be a journalist, clutching their award, and be seen, in an eternal photograph, shaking hands with the convicted felon/sexual predator/war criminal who had caused me to write the article in the first place.
No baby is born into this world to discover he or she comes, eventually, with a price.
P.S. You have my permission to send or e-mail this to anyone you wish.
- Stephen Geller