Like an unhappily married couple that needs but barely tolerates each other, President Trump and the press corps don’t do much hand-holding in public.

The annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner takes place in Washington DC on Saturday night. Like last year, President Trump will be skipping “nerd prom” for a counter-programming rally of his faithful, this time in Michigan, one of the states that tipped the electoral college in his favour in 2016. Appropriately enough, his venue is Washington Township, near Detroit, doubtless allowing him plenty of comparison rhetoric.

And of course, with such ready-made theatre of the polarization between the president and the capital’s black-tied elites, it’s not really surprising he’d be fundraising off it, saying in an email to supporters: “Why would I want to be stuck in a room with a bunch of fake news liberals who hate me?”

It’s now more than a year since Trump has held a formal press conference, so it’s also probably not a surprise that the less time he spends in proximity to reporters is just fine with him, let alone having an actual comedian roasting him. This year it’s Michelle Wolf of The Daily Show, who said recently she doesn’t like to tell Trump jokes “because it’s really hard to tell a surprising Trump joke.”

That’s the price of real life becoming a parody of itself.

There are those who still argue that Trump’s treatment at the hands of President Obama and guest host Seth Meyers at the 2011 dinner led in part to his run for president. Roxanne Roberts wrote in the Washington Post that “Trump was so humiliated by the experience, they say, that it triggered some deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge.”

Whether that’s true or not, since he took office the event has become one of those evenings where both parties just head for separate parts of the house and do their own thing. CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote in his newsletter this morning: “As one correspondent quipped to me, “He’s going to mock us for celebrating ourselves while he’s…” wait for it… “celebrating himself.”

While there will be plenty of opportunities for Trump to rile up his supporters’ ire at everything the dinner represents – Parkland survivor David Hogg will be a guest of The Daily Beast, for example – the evening will honour outstanding journalism in the face of an unrelenting news cycle and an intense working environment that has seen a worrying escalation in threats to reporters.

The most frequent targets of Trump’s “fake news” jibe – CNN and the New York Times – will be recognized for work that doubtless incensed him. CNN for its reporting on the Russia story, while the Times’ Maggie Haberman will receive the Beckman Award for articles showing “a deep understanding of what makes President Trump tick.”

This, of course, is despite being dismissed by the president in a tweet where he said he “had nothing to do with” her, only to be reminded in another tweet that well, yes, he did.

Haberman gave an interview recently to C-Span about covering Trump and when asked for her advice to aspiring journalists, said, simply: “Stay off Twitter.”

In an interview with Variety this week, WHCA president Margaret Talev of Bloomberg said that the “forced reset” of not having the President in the audience has allowed the group to focus on its core mission; “to remind people of why the news matters and why all Americans benefit from the First Amendment.”

A big part of the work of the WHCA is to encourage the journalists of the future through a range of scholarships and, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, Trump on Friday welcomed this year’s recipients – the overwhelming majority of whom are women – to the White House, where he apparently called journalism a “great profession,” before asking how quickly they could replace the existing press corps.

Michael Calderone writes at Politico that the White House beat is “the most prestigious slog in Washington”

There’s no question that we’re all exhausted,” says [The New York Times’ Peter] Baker, who has covered the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama White Houses. But, he continues, you “have to stop and remember this is an extraordinary story and is something we’re going to be talking to our kids and grandkids about.” Other top White House reporters I spoke to felt the same way—bone-tired, but still infused with the sense that they’re on a historic mission covering a norm-busting presidency. “I think we all want to say in 50 years we covered Donald Trump’s White House,” says the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey.

But there are few signs the relationship is likely to get any better anytime soon; even if, as CNN’s Jake Tapper thinks, the president has “lost his mojo” for assigning nicknames – his branding NBC’s Chuck Todd “sleepy eyes” set off a debate about the phrase – all of which means that President Trump really has little to lose by continuing to stay away, claiming he is somehow a victim of the media, while twisting the knife in a way that gets the required response from his base.

In a timely essay at the New York Review of Books, media critic Jay Rosen argues Why Trump is Winning and the Press is Losing. He writes: “There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and it won’t really matter, because Trump supporters categorically reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors aren’t paying close enough attention.”

That was the week that was

Saturday night’s event comes at the end of yet another roller-coaster week for the president.

French president Emmanuel Macron became his first state visitor and Trump warmed up for not being around reporters by not inviting any to their state dinner. The bromance and physicality between the two leaders was widely commented on but then, in his joint address to Congress, it was as if the French leader was dishing to his besties; attacking Trump’s stance on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal and even ripping the dangers of, yes, “fake news”.

To protect our democracies, we have to fight against the ever-growing virus of fake news, which exposes our people to irrational fear and imaginary risks… The corruption of information is an attempt to corrode the very spirit of our democracies.

His comments drew a standing ovation, but perhaps inevitably, invoking the phrase led observers to define their own intent. According to the Washington Post: “On Twitter, Fox News highlighted Macron’s remark. “He’s talking about CNN obviously,” one respondent wrote. “Exactly,” agreed another. “CNN and NYT have to be destroyed.”

But of course the high point of the diplomatic week was the historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea at the peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone and what such rapprochement means for the proposed summit between Trump and Kim Jong-Un, scheduled for sometime in the next few weeks.

At home, though, cautious optimism around next steps for peace in the region predictably gave way to demands for Trump to be given the Nobel Prize; even that President Obama should be stripped of his and that one given to his successor as well.

Domestically, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was approved by the Senate; while the president’s apparently spur-of-the-moment nominee for Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, the White House physician Admiral Ronny Jackson – the man who famously said Trump was “239 pounds … and might live to be 200 years old” – withdrew in chaos. Other members of the president’s cabinet, EPA chief Scott Pruitt and HUD secretary Ben Carson, have also come under intense scrutiny this week.

The latest member of the president’s legal team, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, held his first meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller apparently to discuss a potential interview with the president, who is apparently still seething at  the raid on his lawyer, Michael Cohen.

But perhaps the most must-see television of the week was when the president called in to Fox and Friends on Thursday morning to talk about, well, whatever he wanted really. Despite actually asking some good questions, after the thirty minute therapy session the hosts couldn’t seem to wait to get him off the line, eventually saying “We’d love to talk all day, but it looks like you have a million things to do..”

Clearly he didn’t.

Richard Wolffe in The Guardian speculated that the “Trump” who got on the air was actually a crank caller and that the interview was “the work of an evil genius determined to undermine the otherwise unblemished first year of the Trump presidency.” Even as observers dissected the effect on the president’s legal position of his unexpected wrecking ball, Trump adviser Kelly Anne Conway doubled down, saying her boss thought it went great and wants to call in to the show on a regular basis – “perhaps once a month, or as news breaks”.

Finally, British PM Theresa May – perhaps a little envious of the Macron lovefest – announced that a date has finally been agreed for president Trump to visit the UK, strategically positioned between Northern Ireland’s Orange parades and Bastille Day. There’ll be no gold carriage or pomp and ceremony, though, and according to the Financial Times, his itinerary won’t take him “anywhere he can be publicly shouted at.”

Which, when you think about it, is exactly the vibe he’s going for on Saturday night.

 

You can watch the White House Correspondents Association dinner on C-Span here.

You can most likely watch President Trump’s Michigan rally at the same time on Fox News here.

 

Related stories:

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‘Let them tell the whole lie’

 

 

Also published on Medium.