White House Press Corps So Glad The Nazis Are Back, WHEW!
The enemy of my enemy of the people is ... wait, how does it go?
Uh oh, time to hate the mainstream Beltway media again.
No, this is not about how the Washington Post has become an utter joke whose editorial board writes with a straight face that Trump setting terrorists and child porn convicts free is the same as Joe Biden preemptively pardoning his family members to protect them from Trump’s Justice Department making up crimes in order to target them under bullshit pretenses.
Obviously, that is worth your wrath.
This is about the Columbia Journalism Review’s piece on how excited the White House press corps is to be done with those stinky Bidens and their White House comms team and have the Trump Nazis back, because the Trump Nazis are so much more fuuuuuuun and they talk to them a whole bunch and they like to stay up late at night talking about boys and braiding hair and eating pizzas they ordered with their dad’s credit card.
Do the Trump Nazis consider journalists to be the enemy of the people and regularly incite threats and hatred against them? Well yes.
Is Donald Trump currently raging that MSNBC should not even be allowed to be on the air? Well yes.
Was a weather person in Milwaukee fired for criticizing Elon Musk’s Nazi salute? A weather person? Well yes.
Does that bode well for, you know, the First Amendment? Well no.
But this is about access, you guys! Accesssssssssssss! The Biden team wasn’t fun or nice and didn’t invite them out for drinks at the hottest clubs or tell them all the latest gossip and OH MY FUCKING GOD, YOU HACKS, THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR FRIENDS.
CJR says:
The return of Donald Trump to the White House has prompted predictable worries among many DC-based reporters about how his administration might seek to control and intimidate the press. But for a surprising number of people on the daily White House beat, that concern is mixed with another, more privately expressed emotion: relief at finally being rid of the Joe Biden press operation.
Why yes, that is surprising. Are they morons?
“I think it’s important for people to understand the context, that we’re coming out of four years of Biden and things haven’t been great,” one White House print reporter told CJR. “There’ve been fewer eyeballs on the press briefings and less attention than under Trump, so people just don’t understand some of the very frustrating things that we’ve dealt with and that we hope are going to be rolled back.”
OMG Becky tell us.
Among those frustrations: the Biden press office largely kept reporters at a remove from the president …
OMG was he busy or something? No Oval Office sleepovers with late-night strip Jenga tournaments?
Inside the briefing room, reporters who didn’t hold coveted front-row seats felt they got much less opportunity to ask questions.
“For a lot of people, what was the point in even going?” said a veteran White House reporter.
Hey, has anybody heard when Trump’s new Kayleigh Huckabee Spicynanny “Karoline Leavitt” has scheduled the first Trump daily press briefing? Or is that just not on the calendar yet?
Oh well, we are sure she’ll get around to it and it will be awesome for all the reporters currently bitching anonymously in this article.
Trump, on the other hand, adores the attention of the media, even as he frequently maligns the reporters themselves. During his first term, he regularly chatted with White House reporters during strolls to Marine One, and held a number of high-profile, if occasionally ill-conceived, televised sit-downs, with everyone from Axios’s Jonathan Swan to Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy. (On his first night back, Trump spent forty-five minutes casually answering media questions in the Oval Office, while he signed executive orders.)
“Despite his sometimes strident and sometimes even violent rhetoric about the press, he loves talking to us,” the print reporter said. “And his team—they like talking to us, and they know that they’re going to have a huge audience.”
THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR FRIIIIIIEND.
HE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR FRIIIIIIEND.
We get that in any situation where people share space for long periods of time, a certain level of collegiality will develop, you’ll be aware of when one of them is having a baby or maybe their mother is sick, and you are a decent human being, so you care about that.
BUT THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR FRIIIIIIIIEND.
THE STUPID-HITLER-IN-CHIEF IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR FRIIIIIIIIEND.
“I actually think the team that’s coming in is not going to be as horrific as people might imagine,” the veteran White House reporter said. “It’s not going to be like the first Trump term, where nobody had any idea what they were doing.”
Incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt and communications director Steven Cheung are seen by White House reporters as “full MAGA, but they’re also professionals,” as the veteran reporter put it.
Oh yeah? Are they going to be super professional now, while they lie to you? Are they going to be better at lying to your faces than the stable full of mouthbreathers from the first Trump term was?
And also they are going to heart your reels on Insta, probably?
There’s more in the Columbia Journalism Review article if you want to hear more quotes from Beltway reporters who don’t quite understand what the job of “reporter” is. It’s not like the White House press corps is known for being anything besides stenographers. They don’t break stories or anything.
Maybe there are Biden press team horrors we are totally missing here. Maybe the Biden press team didn’t view that room full of reporters as some kind of bouncy house daycare they were required to make balloon animals for and honk horns at and otherwise entertain at all hours of the day.
Maybe sometimes Karine Jean-Pierre just sat them down in front of “Bluey” and left the room.
Regardless, we’re sure glad for the surely very serious White House press corps that they will now have Trump fascism to keep them entertained.
What’s that sound, press corps? Is Karoline Leavitt jingling the keys? Is she going to take you for a ride in the car? Are you going for a ride? You get to go? Are you going to the park? Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!
Useless fucks.
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I spent 40 years working around real reporters. They worked sources, studied documents, and made followup calls. Pretty boring. If they hit paydirt, there would be press conferences aplenty, with lots of flying feathers. There is nothing like watching an official squirm in front of the cameras when they know the jig is up. Before that, you have to put in the work.
What professionals don't do is hang around a controlled environment prayin' and hopin' the preznit or his spokesweenies calls on MEEEEEEE!
"MSNBC should not even be allowed to be on the air"
MSNBC, like Fox Spews, is not on "the air". It's on cable.