They did it again. It happens every year. My invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner got lost in the mail. However, this year, I was not the only one to avoid the penguin suit and the rubber chicken. Every president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the dinner at least once. So far, President Donald Trump has yet to make an appearance as president. Instead of the kind of president they want, exemplified by Jed Bartlet of The West Wing (Democrat, professional economist, and complete fantasy), the correspondents get President Bartleby, who prefers not to attend.
The vexed matter of Trump’s attendance would probably never have arisen had he not attended the 2011 dinner as a civilian, been roasted by former President Barack Obama, and determined upon revenge. This was the first time in history that an amateur comedy routine triggered a regime change, the early speeches of Mussolini notwithstanding. The second Trump administration does not see its rise to power as the usual rotation between parties that agree on the purpose of government and the policies that will serve it. It intends to change both. This is more ambitious than former President Ronald Reagan’s program in 1980. Trump wants to dismantle the house that FDR built.
Recommended Stories
- Inside Scoop: Democratic star search sidelined by haunted past and criminal obsession
- Harvard vs. Trump: The administration's battle with elite higher education is a mixed bag
- Tariffs: Trump’s content and messaging fiasco
“It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,” Britain’s former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan observed when the Kennedy brothers took over in 1960.
I just spent a few days in Washington, D.C., and detected a similar mood, apart from the “respectable” bit. A prostrate city awaits the conqueror’s decree. The bourgeois liberals quail as the Borgia barbarians gawp at the marble halls and test the fittings to see which they can carry off. The soldiery revel long a-night. While the White House correspondents held their dinner, across town, Steve Bannon, a man of convictions, some of them criminal, invited MAGA’s new media wing to wassail at a party called “The Uninvited.”
A few days later, the second Trump administration passed its 100-day mark. An entirely arbitrary convention of premature judgment now attends this calendrical nonevent. Daniel J. Boorstin wrote the book on this phenomenon in 1962, when the Borgias ruled D.C. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, Boorstin identifies the nonevent as the quintessential media event, a contrived performance masquerading as news. The people whose tickets to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner did not get lost in the mail hit the mark. Trump’s first 100 days, we learned, were a paralytic failure yet somehow also a triumph of fascism.
Trump combines Victor Borge, the Danish comedian-pianist, with Cesare Borgia, the Roman mercenary who set Machiavelli thinking. Trump’s first 100 days were neither a Napoleonic flame-out nor a Four-Year Plan compressed into less than four months. However, they did induce gibbering panic among America’s allies, a serio-comic fit of high-mindedness from the American media, and intermittent howling from a Democratic Party otherwise preoccupied with tearing itself apart. Satisfying as this was, it tells us little about the administration’s chances of pulling off what, if it works, would be the remaking of the American state.
The state and the social compact are remade every 80 years or so. It happened after 1776, again after 1865, and then for a third time after the New Deal and World War II. Trump promised to initiate the fourth shift in 2016, but he, like Obama before him, was blocked by the bureaucratic resistance and inertia that Obama called “the Blob” and Trump calls “the Swamp.” Trump has returned with a plan to force through a fourth epochal shift. The preliminaries of redefining the state include purging dysfunctional and corrupt bureaucracies such as USAID and the Department of Education, breaking client networks through reorganizing the State Department, and opening the books via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. However, new procedures and networks must be installed for this to work.
The state runs on information technology. The social compact stands on trust: in the law, in fairness, in opportunity, and in material improvement. The media described the wave of 211 executive actions that Trump issued as random blasts of buckshot, but they are more like targeted strikes. Some of them resemble bunker-busters, those bombs that burrow into the ground before detonating a delayed fuse. Trump’s tariff chaos has tanked the Dow and captivated the media, but the pattern of strikes covers every aspect of American politics and society.
The ground is being cleared. The plan is to rebuild domestic workshop and factory production, harness them to artificial intelligence-enhanced governance, and harden America’s borders, military, and trade terms in an increasingly disordered world. I know nothing about economics, so I go with my gut. I feel that, considering all the tariff chaos and contraindicators of these first months, things might work out.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.