What do former presidents Nixon and Carter have in common with Trump and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? All three made the decision to put distance between themselves and the yearly mainstream media banquet bash. President Trump announced earlier this year that he will not be attending the annual event and dinner organizers made a decision to add Muslim Hasan Minhaj, as its comedic headliner this year, according to the New York Times. Was a liberal rat trap being laid for Trump?
What better vehicle for the mainstream media butt kissers of liberals and all things anti-Trump than to recruit a comedian who is making a career torching every aspect of the president’s immigration executive orders. Minhaj, a senior correspondent for The Daily Show, has made it a regular practice to skewer President Trump on the Comedy Central show.
This time the comedian will have the opportunity to take his one-sided humorous attempt to a much broader audience when he steps onto the dinner dais on April 29th.
The dinner has been used in previous years by liberal comedians as a public stage to launch into vitriolic assaults on Republican presidents going back to the Nixon years. In fact, President Nixon sent a memo to his staff in 1971 and stressed to them that skipping the White House Correspondents Dinner was in the best interest of the administration. In the memo he added, “Perhaps treating them with considerably more contempt is in the long run a more productive policy,” reported the Weekly Standard.
Former president Jimmy Carter, made a similar decision to ditch the dinner and skipped two of the four he had an opportunity to attend. In fact, in his memoirs he wrote that the media put considerable pressure on him to change his mind and submit to their adolescent attacks all in the name of their version of twisted sophomoric humor.
Carter, like Nixon, saw no upside in attending the dinner. He mentioned of that first refusal to attend, “I was de¬term¬ined not to go. They al¬most ex¬ert black¬mail on me to at¬tend, but I am not go¬ing to do it in the fu¬ture. I don’t see how the White House press could be any more neg¬at¬ive un¬der any cir¬cum¬stances and I’d rather show a sign of strength, ” according to The Weekly Standard.
So where is the upside for President Trump to attend an annual mainstream media event that has done everything but declare open warfare on his administration in order to marginalize his presidency? To say that the relationship between the Trump administration and the media was strained would be the understatement of the year.
Many comedians who ordinarily would have taken a bite at the invitation apple to be on the dais and headline the annual dinner joined late-night host James Corden, and reportedly declined invitations to this year’s one-sided biased event.
In addition to the president’s absence, his entire White House staff will be taking a pass as well and will find other more productive thigs to do than attend the White House Correspondents dinner. So, in effect, this will be an annual dinner whose only connection to the White House and its occupant will be the name.
In actuality, the president and his staff have dodged this media-made verbal assault weapon because the Muslim comedian actually has made the president’s immigration policies personal in his attack on Trump. According to the New York Times, this planned dinner roaster issued scathing verbal attacks on the President-elect the day after his election when Minhaj described his misguided understanding of Trump’s immigration policies toward Muslims.
At the dinner, he and his fellow liberals can laugh it up and continue their acid-laced humorous attacks on Trump, but he, like Nixon and Carter before him, as well as the rest of America, will not be listening or even care.
Image: By DoD News photo by EJ Hersom – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/2573392/obamas-and-bidens-open-uso-show#.Vy-qefmLTIU, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48649823
