The Washington Dinner That Was Really Obscene

Guests and armed security agents at the White House Correspondents' Dinner after a gunman shot an agent near the ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Saturday. Jason Dick/CQ Roll Call/AP

I was not at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that was interrupted by a gunman on Saturday night. For 25 years or so, I’ve attended these shindigs. I’m aware of the longstanding and understandable objections to the dinner. It doesn’t look good for reporters to be hobnobbing with the powerful people they are supposed to cover and hold accountable. But for me, it has been an occasion to interact with not just fellow journalists but those politicians and officials who won’t return my calls. Even these brief encounters I’ve had at the dinner have helped me figure out folks who run our lives and have generated story ideas. It turns out that it’s hard for most people to be rude to someone when you’re both dressed in formal wear and holding a drink.

In a similar fashion, over the years I’ve done important reporting from the green room at the cable news networks—where guests are situated before being brought on air. (“Sen. Hatch, that’s a nice tie, and I’m curious how you came to push for that legislation that helped a foreign-owned bank.”)

Since my journalism doesn’t depend on access to high-and-mighty sources, a once-a-year elbow-grazing with a Cabinet member or White House official doesn’t affect what I do. My work proves that one can flit through such a function and remain fiercely independent. For other reporters, the optics may not be good, especially if there are questions regarding their willingness to piss off sources and jeopardize their access. (Feel free to debate me.)

This year was obviously different, with Donald Trump scheduled to be present. Clearly, it would be a sickening spectacle for an autocrat wannabe who has demonized the media and fomented hate against journalists—among his many transgressions—to sit on the dais and be afforded the opportunity to deliver a speech in which he either would (a) utter phony sentiments supporting a free press or (b) continue his war on journalism. (My money was on B.) At these dinners, the president literally gets the last word. Also, this is a guy responsible for extreme abuses of power, the spread of corrosive corruption and grift, and an immense and unforgivable amount of misery, death, and destruction. Just in the last year. Share a meal with him? And with his bootlicking lieutenants? Stephen Miller? Scott Bessent? Pete Hegseth? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Hard pass.

I understand why the White House Correspondents’ Association—of which I am a member—invited Trump. It has always invited whoever was president. (Until this year, Trump had never accepted as president.) And its officers, I assume, feared that if they did not extend an invitation to Trump, they would be branded as biased against him—and fuel his “fake news” crusade against the media. (Mainstream news outlets are generally terrified of being accused by muckety-mucks of being unfair.) But had I been asked, I would have advised against inviting the demagogue—an act of normalization. You don’t sup with someone trying to annihilate you—let alone an authoritarian who attempted to end American democracy.

Consequently, I attended an alternative black-tie event sponsored by Substack for new media and was not present for the shooting. I look forward to returning to the dinner in the future. But probably not to the rerun the WHCA might hold in the coming weeks. As of this writing, that seems to be up in the air. But if a do-over occurs, I’m sure Trump will exploit that platform to serve his dangerous agenda.

The shooting and the dinner inspired many takes, which you might have already absorbed. But perhaps a more important dinner happened in DC two nights earlier.

On the day that Warner Bros. investors approved the company’s acquisition by Paramount, billionaire nepo-baby David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount and son of pro-Trump oligarch Larry Ellison, hosted a dinner “honoring” the White House and CBS News reporters at the bogusly named Donald J. Trump US Institute of Peace. Trump attended the bash.

This was obscene. The above invitation says it all: CBS paying tribute to the Trump gang to celebrate the First Amendment. This was especially galling after Paramount in July agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a meritless lawsuit he filed against 60 Minutes. That was done to pave the way for Skydance, Ellison’s company, to win federal approval of its takeover of Paramount—a rubber-stamping it then obtained. Paramount’s surrender to Trump was a brazen shakedown scheme. The Knight First Amendment Institute called the settlement “extortionate.” You want the mob boss’s approval for a merger, you shove money into his pocket.

The agenda of Ellison’s dinner was no secret. Paramount now needs approval from the Trump administration to complete its acquisition of Warner Bros. Under this deal, the new megafirm would own a gigantic portion of the media world, controlling Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. studios, HBO, CBS, CNN, and many other media and entertainment companies. The Ellisons would reign over much of American culture and the news media. The deal would likely lead to reduced competition, job losses, fewer opportunities for creators, and, possibly, the injection of the Ellisons’ interests and political views into CNN’s and CBS News’ coverage.

So Ellison the Younger was ass-kissing away. This oligarchic corruption stank. And the notion of extolling CBS News and Trump for each embracing the First Amendment was ludicrous. You have to give them points for chutzpah.

Look at Trump’s record. He has filed or threatened to file meritless lawsuits against other news organizations, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and ABC News. He has defunded NPR and PBS. He has been trying to kill Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (That move has so far been successfully challenged in federal court.) He booted Associated Press out of the White House media pool for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His defense secretary forced the major news organizations out of the Pentagon press pool. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of Federal Communications Commission, has threatened to pull broadcasting licenses from media he deems as unfair to Trump. The FBI searched the home of a Washington Post reporter. Federal agents have arrested independent journalists, including Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, for covering protests. The Freedom of the Press Foundation clocked 215 anti-media posts on Trump’s social media account in 2025.

This is not a fellow for a media company to honor—unless it needs a favor from him.

Adding insult to injury regarding Ellison’s swanky feast was the venue. Trump has eviscerated the US Institute of Peace, a nonprofit corporation (and not part of the executive branch) and illegally (arguably) seized its building and slapped his name on it. Branding an institute dedicated to peace studies with his moniker is akin to naming a school for girls after Jeffrey Epstein.

There was a small protest outside the dinner—across the street—where Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Becca Balint decried the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, assailing media consolidation, and leaders of public interest groups, such as Public Citizen, Common Cause, and Free Press (not to be confused with Bari Weiss’ The Free Press) vowed to fight approval of the deal. But during a time of many outrages and a flood of foul plutocratic wheeling and dealing, it remains to be seen how much popular opposition can be generated.

This dinner was a transparent display of autocratic politics. Its obviousness was a troubling sign. These days, our oligarchs don’t bother to fret about being caught corrupting and subverting the system. In the Trump era, they can hide the graft in plain sight.

While Ellison was feting the Trump White House, Status, a newsletter and website that feistily covers the media, held its own soiree at a lovely seafood joint on the DC waterfront. The percentage of working journalists at this bash was much higher than what’s usually found at the bigger, fancier WHCD. Plus, no government officials, no politicians, no celebrities. Unless you consider Mehdi Hasan a celebrity.

Status demonstrated that journalists can gather to celebrate the First Amendment and even congratulate themselves without fraternizing with a man who calls them the “enemy of the people. The spirit was captured by this placard displayed at the entrance:

As they say in The Mandalorian, This Is the Way.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

One of the many feuds within the right-wing today is the spat between the traditional College Republicans and the College Republicans of America, a new outfit that emerged in 2023, hoping to replace the older group, which has been wracked with internal conflicts and power grabs. Last month, Kai Schwemmer was named political director of CRA, the more MAGA-ish of the organizations, which has ties to Turning Point USA, the organization Charlie Kirk led.

Should we congratulate Schwemmer? Perhaps not. Right Wing Watch, a project of the liberal group People for the American Way, describes him as an “overt groyper, which is the term used by followers of Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist, Nick Fuentes.” Schwemmer, it adds, “has a channel on Fuentes' invitation-only streaming platform Cozy and was featured as a ‘special guest’ at Fuentes' 2022 APFAC III conference.” In March, Right Wing Watch posted a video of Schwemmer explaining his fondness for Fuentes:

The group notes, “This seems to be Schwemmer's role in the movement: Putting a moderate face on America First's racist, antisemitic, and radically authoritarian agenda.” Schwemmer’s rise in the world of young conservatives is yet one more sign that white nationalism and antisemitism is infecting significant corners of MAGA and that hate-propelled extremism has found a comfy home in Trump’s America First movement.

Death by Lightning. Toward the end of Death by Lightning, the four-episode miniseries on the election and assassination of President James Garfield that was produced in part by the Game of Thrones creators, Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, lies to him. On his deathbed after being shot, he asks her, “Do you think my name will have some place in human history?” She replies, “Yes, a grand one.” But in a subsequent scene, after he has died, she says that she did not believe that: “In reality, I know history won’t remember him at all. Be no reason to. Be a minor footnote at best. An idle piece of trivia. Do you recall poor old what’s-his-name who was shot three months into his presidency?…And they won’t ever know about the man he truly was.”

This is a rather meta moment. Garfield’s place in history generally boils down to this: a president who was shot early in his administration by a disappointed office seeker and who died two months later due to the wound. Yet Death by Lightning is here to show that (fictitious) Lucretia was wrong.

The limited series presents a marvelous political yarn. During the 1880 election, the Republican Party, which held the White House with Rutherford B. Hayes as president, was sharply divided into two camps: the Stalwarts, who were in favor of (and greatly benefitted from) the spoils system run by political machines, and the Half-Breeds, do-gooders who urged civil service reform. The clash between the two led to a deadlock at the party’s presidential convention, as former President Ulysses S. Grant, the Stalwarts’ man, could not overcome opposition from the Half-Breeds. After 36 ballots, Garfield, then a little-known congressman from Ohio, was nominated.

Garfield had won the hearts of the delegates by earlier delivering a nominating speech in support of Treasury Secretary John Sherman, the Half-Breeds’ standard bearer, in which he called for reform and for breaking free of the party bosses. His pitch: Let’s clean up our party and the government. Garfield’s nomination put him on a collision course with New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling, the powerful leader of the Stalwarts and the major party boss who controlled the collection of tariff revenue through the Port of New York—the major source of funds for the federal government. Conkling’s ally, Chester Arthur, was placed on the ticket as the veep nominee as a consolation prize for the Stalwarts.

There’s plenty of political drama, as the moderately tempered Garfield (Michael Shannon), aided by Maine Sen. James Blaine (Bradley Whitford), clashes with Conkling (Shea Whigham) and the often-drunk Arthur (Nick Offerman) is tugged back and forth between the two sides. Meanwhile, Charles Guiteau, a self-delusional petty thief and conman who believes he is destined for greatness, tries to insinuate himself into the Garfield camp in the hope of landing a job in the new administration. He is played exquisitely by Matthew Macfadyen (who was the unctuous Tom Wambsgan in Succession.)

This is not just the tale of a disappointed office seeker and poor what’s-his-name. The nature of the still-young federal government is to be determined. A government of graft or competent public service? The stakes are sky-high. (And this is the debate we are—or, that is, should be—having today.) The series, based on the book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard, makes a 144-year-old political conflict, waged mainly by old white guys in beards and top hats, almost as gripping as the battle for control of the Iron Throne in Westeros.

There’s one slight problem: Garfield. As portrayed here, he is hyper-earnest. He is self-effacing, highly principled, and noble in intent. He almost always does the right thing. If only we had such a president today! Yet Guiteau, his assassin, is far more interesting, as he’s propelled by both derangement and a desire for recognition and celebrity. He resents being turned down for a job and sees that as a sign the Republicans care not for the common man. Alas, despite the series’ goal to remind us of Garfield’s grandness, it is the disturbed Guiteau who leaves more of an impression and may fit more easily into our present moment than the ever-so-decent Garfield. 

Highway of Diamonds: Black America Sings Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has published more than 350 songs, and he is one of the most covered songwriters in the history of popular music. By one account, 5,000 artists have recorded 9,000 versions of his compositions. That’s quite the legacy for this recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier this year, Ace Records released a compilation of 20 of those 9,000 versions, each recorded by a Black musician. There’s Nina Simone doing a melancholic “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and the Staples Singers with a gospel-inflected “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Dylan doesn’t need any more accolades, but this collection is a testament to the power of his songwriting, which produced songs that can be interpreted in so many fashions beyond his own inimitable style. Here are two are my favorite tracks from this set: