Living through authoritarianism is a much richer and more complex experience than I expected. Naively, I’d assumed that a dictator just sent some thugs to shut down the newspapers, built his own propaganda machine and forced through laws punishing ‘unpatriotic’ speech. A few brave Alexei Navalny-like figures would publish the truth regardless, and someone would see their work in 50 years and make an independent movie about them.
But it turns out that, as soon as the scent of fascism is in the air, most journalists surrender without even being asked. Last year, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both pulled presidential endorsements just in case Trump won. And on Saturday, the White House Correspondents’ Association yanked Amber Ruffin from her gig hosting their annual dinner on April 26—because she said some mean things on The Daily Beast Podcast.
The White House Correspondents’ Association was once a fearless organization that decided who sat where at press conferences and ran the newsroom located right inside the White House. I know how brave they were because they let me follow Bill Clinton on Air Force One for three days and take notes for the newsmagazine pool back when I was 27 and wrote Q&As with Yasmine Bleth. (They also let me hang out for a day to research a network sitcom pilot.)
ADVERTISEMENT
These were veteran reporters who had not only covered the Vietnam War but did so while carrying around 1970s radio equipment.
And now they’re afraid of Amber Ruffin? The high-pitched Late Night with Seth Meyers writer with the name of a Dickens urchin? Because she upset administration officials with what she said on a podcast? That’s the equivalent of Shecky Greene making fun of your Boston accent to Soupy Sales over lunch at the Friars Club in 1963.
All Ruffin said, by the way, was that the White House Correspondents’ Association made a ridiculous request that she mock both political parties equally. That’s not how roasts work! You don’t take a break in the middle of the Tom Brady roast to tell some Jared Goff zingers.
“They got their feelings hurt. They want the false equivalency that the media does,” Ruffin told co-hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee of figures in and around Trump’s administration. “It makes them feel like human beings. But they shouldn’t get to feel that way, because they’re not.”
“I don’t see how you could do it without then becoming a part of what’s wrong,” she added of taking a ‘both sides’ approach to her set. Are those the words I’d want to hear from the rabbi before officiating my wedding? No. But it is what you expect to hear before a roast.
Admittedly, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is weird. It’s a roast of the sitting president. A comedian tears him apart while he sits there and pretends to be amused and then gets on stage and fires one-liners written by either the best comedy writers in the world (if he’s a Democrat) or the worst ones (if he’s a Republican). Not many democracies have a designated time and place every year where they schedule mockery of their leader. But that’s what makes it a great democratic institution. Mark Twain said that “against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” Even kings had jesters.
Donald Trump is the only president who has never attended the dinner. So it makes even less sense that the White House Correspondents’ Association would cancel the comedian this year, of all years. In February the organization’s president, Eugene Daniels, announced, “When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list.” But following her podcast appearance, he wrote that the group wasn’t going to have a comedian after all because, “At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.”
This acquiescence didn’t even gain the goodwill with MAGA critics Daniels was likely hoping for. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich labeled Daniels’ about-face “a cop out statement” on X, adding that his prior decision to book Ruffin was “an indictment on how broken and useless this organization has become… so sad that such a storied and consequential group has been so quickly driven into irrelevancy.” (The point of totalitarians, of course, is to make everything irrelevant. I can tell Budowich believes this because he still uses X.)
Daniels is about to get a hosting job on MSNBC. If he’s worried about the politics of division in a room full of drunk journalists, wait until he has to deal with emails from my liberal mom.
