For as long as I can remember, the White House Correspondents dinner was where the Washington press corps and Washington officials basked in each other’s celebrity.
Last night’s ended abruptly with gunshots, Secret Service officers screaming at attendees to “get down,” Trump and other officials being rapidly ushered out of the ballroom, plates crashing and chairs falling, and general pandemonium.
Last night, the celebrities became normal people feeling panic and fear.
Most of the time, Washington is a stage on which actors take on roles and dress up for assigned parts. I remember wearing an uncomfortable tuxedo to the White House Correspondents Dinner, trying to make pleasant conversation with people who had skewered me that very morning.
The glamor and swish of the event was at such sharp odds with the hard daily slog of my job that the event seemed strangely disembodied, as if everyone had been given a script that they knew was total bull----.
Trump has changed much of this. He has brought a grim hostility to the jobs of doing the public’s work and reporting on those who do the public’s work. This was the first White House Correspondents dinner he agreed to attend, and by all accounts he was prepared to give the media pure hell in his remarks.
And then hell erupted in the form of another crazed gunman. As I write this, it appears that one Secret Service agent was injured but none of the luminaries was hurt.
There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of last night’s attendees were in Congress on January 6, 2021 when Trump’s thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol.)
Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.
It is no longer the hard slog I remember. The drama in Washington is now a chaotic tragedy, most of whose actors — those who make the news and those who report it — live in continuous uncertainty and turmoil.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.