Welcome to another week of Washington Secrets, where we are recovering from Friday’s big dinner. Today, we offer some thoughts on the White House Correspondents’ Association and its relationship with Donald Trump, and we prepare for Anthony Fauci’s Senate showdown on Wednesday…
Weijia Jiang received an eleventh-hour get-out-of-jail-free card.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice on Thursday dropped its attempt to subpoena four New York Times journalists and force them to reveal their sources for a story about security concerns with the new Air Force One.
The decision landed as the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association was finalizing her speech for the group’s delayed annual dinner.
Would she bring up the direct attack on press freedoms a day later, when her words would be beamed around the nation with Trump sitting beside her in a tuxedo?
She chose not to. Instead, her speech told the story of her own childhood, American exceptionalism, and a more general First Amendment challenge to the man beside her.
“When we ask questions, you push back,” she said on Friday evening. “You give us answers, and we push back.”
“You have always been a deal guy. Well, that’s the deal. And the First Amendment is a done deal. And that’s what we toast tonight.”
With that out of the way, Trump did what he always does. He used a formal occasion for a rally-style speech, insulting journalists by name, deploying nicknames for political opponents, and floating the idea of yet another presidential run.
In his most vicious comments, he attacked a favorite target, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, comparing her to a trans influencer.
“I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship,” he said, “but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.”
Trump’s appearance dominated the headlines. But when Secrets caught up with a handful of journalists the next day, it was not Trump’s speech that rankled.
“It was no surprise to hear him talk like that,” said one Washington veteran. “It was Weijia’s speech that was the real disappointment.”
Another pointed out that because the dinner had been rescheduled from April, when a gunman disrupted proceedings, Jiang’s term as president was over. She had extra freedom to speak up.
Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, went public, calling for the WHCA to take a new approach.
“Our mission is to defend the First Amendment rights of White House correspondents to report on the president without fear or favor,” he posted on X. “Unfortunately last night did not advance that cause. Time to rethink the dinner.”
The tension is obvious. Washington journalists thrive on access. And the cozy dinner is a symptom of a system that rewards soft questions with profile.
Yet the Correspondents’ Association is meant to stand up for the First Amendment while also rewarding its members with a privileged position at the heart of power.
How is that working out? It has endured a torrid year, with the Wall Street Journal kicked off Air Force One because of its reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and the Associated Press expelled for a time from the pool system because of its refusal to toe the line on the “Gulf of America.”
Meanwhile, anyone with the president’s phone number can call up the commander in chief and publish his thoughts on Iran, foreign leaders, or the World Cup. Why do anything to risk that opportunity?
Threading the needle is not easy.
Having Trump at the annual dinner for the first time ever as president was a coup for Jiang. But it came with compromises, ditching the usual barb-throwing comedian for the gentle humor of a mentalist, for example.
Plenty of journalists think the compromises have gone too far.
Monday’s Semafor media newsletter revealed that CNN bosses were so horrified by the president’s attack on Collins that they may scale back their presence next year, or boycott it altogether.
Lisa Stark, a former ABC journalist who organized a letter last week urging the association to do more, quoted the previous president, Eugene Daniels, last year, calling for members to stand up for press freedom in the face of government interference.
“Last night, the WHCA could have delivered that message directly to the president and vowed to resist his administration’s assault on press freedom,” she posted on Saturday. “Regrettably, it chose not to do so.”
More than 11 years after Trump rode the famous golden escalator into politics, journalists are still trying to work out what to do with him.
No wonder the president used Friday’s speech as yet another victory lap.
Fauci’s diaries
The pandemic and its public health response have become so politicized that it is hard to separate fact from fiction and legitimate questions from bad-faith attacks.
Now we have a whole trove of documents to sort through after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diaries last week, ahead of the former National Institutes of Health official’s appearance at a hearing this week.
It is all part of Paul’s effort to identify the origins of the COVID-19 virus, or the latest round in his effort to discredit a political enemy, depending on your point of view. Scientists have repeatedly argued that although the NIH funded virus research in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus was first detected in 2019, it could not have triggered the pandemic.
One of the entries released by Paul, from Jan. 26, 2020, will be harnessed by Fauci critics.
“It now appears using [epidemiological] data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” the entry reads. “The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection… Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”
He goes on to add that the virus must have jumped from animals to humans somewhere.
Even so, it all adds to the sense that he was saying one thing in public and another in private to his diary. He continued to identify the market as a place where the virus could easily jump the species barrier for the next year at least.
We will find out on Wednesday how he defends the contrast between public comments and private notes.
Lunchtime reading
The mystery of why a British woman paid an American man to kill her: The extraordinary story of Sonia Exelby’s life and death in the backwaters of Marion County, Florida.
An admiral’s rise reveals the politics driving Hegseth’s Pentagon: How to make friends and influence people in Pete Hegseth’s administration.
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