First Draft – 🥂 Journalists: Stop Partying With Donald Trump!
Tomorrow, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, reporters will pal around with the man who keeps threatening to put them in jail. Plus: more details on Israel's murder of a journalist in Lebanon.
On this day in 1980, the failure of a military mission to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran resulted in the deaths of eight US servicemembers. President Jimmy Carter took full responsibility – and went on to lose the White House to Ronald Reagan in November that year.
Hi, everybody. It’s Swin. I’m in Ohio right now (because I live here, Go Bearcats), so I won’t be attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC, this Saturday. I also won’t be attending because I have a soul and would like to keep it, and I’m worried the demonic presence at this year’s media cotillion would try to suck it out through my solar plexus, like a scene from an ‘Evil Dead’ movie. But more on that in a moment…
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the Washington press corps gets ready to get cozy with its chief tormentor, horrific details emerge of Israel’s killing of a Lebanese reporter, and even a Fox poll finds that voters think Trump is unfit to be president.
Don’t. Go.
If someone you knew kept threatening you and your friends with torture and rape in jail – and if that someone kept doing it with a grin – would you invite them to a dinner party?
You wouldn’t. Some lines need to be drawn in the sand.
And yet we are now years into Donald Trump making precisely that threat, over and over, at political journalists who piss him off, and now he has the power of the federal government to help him try to do it. “We’re going to go to the media company… and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail,’” the president said this month.
Trump has adopted the idea of imprisoning journalists so they get raped as an applause line – musing that once a reporter “learns he’s going to be married to a certain prisoner who’s extremely strong, tough, and mean, he will say, ‘You know, I think I’m going to give you the information.’”
And yet, for some reason, a large number of journalists have dry-cleaned their cocktail attire, so that they may attend a glitzy dinner party starring Mr. Trump in Washington, DC, this weekend.