This Saturday night, for the first time in decades, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner will go ahead without its guest of honor, the President, in attendance. In February, Donald Trump said that he wouldn't be showing up; subsequently, it was announced that members of his Administration would be staying away, too. (Trump will be holding a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, instead.) The last President to miss the dinner had a compelling excuse: Ronald Reagan, in 1981, had been shot just a few weeks earlier, and was recuperating at Camp David. But he still managed to speak at the ceremony via telephone. “If I could give you just one little bit of advice, when somebody tells you to get in a car quick, do it,” Reagan joked, about his near assassination.

The annual dinner, which dates back to the early nineteen-twenties, is Washington society's rather awkward stab at a kind of glamour better suited to Hollywood. Reagan called it the press's "spring prom"; lately it has been known, snarkily but with a kind of affection, as "nerd prom." In recent years, the dinner and accompanying comedy roast, with remarks by the President followed by a featured comedian, has become a famous-person showcase, with actors, models, and other celebrities mingling with the likes of Andrea Mitchell and Wolf Blitzer. Last year, President Obama pointed out that the Kardashian-family ingénue Kendall Jenner was in the audience, and then admitted that he didn't know exactly what she did for work.

For years, many in the press have decried the dinner for projecting a kind of sordid chumminess between journalists and politicians. The Times forbids its employees from attending; in 2011, Dean Baquet, then the paper's Washington, D.C., bureau chief, explained the boycott by saying, "It just feels like it sends the wrong signal to our readers and viewers, like we are all in it together and it is all a game." Trump's election, and his hostility toward the press, seemed to demand a change in the night's tone, and to provide a natural—and to many, welcome—opportunity to rethink the nature of the event. At the beginning of February, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair announced that they wouldn't be hosting their annual parties; the following month, Bloomberg, Time, and People said they'd forgo theirs as well. Much of the press had greeted Trump's election as a constitutional crisis, while Trump had labelled the press “the enemy of the American people”—the prospect of a jovial shared evening in April seemed both unlikely and unseemly. “There’s no reason for him to go in and sit and pretend like this is going to be just another Saturday night,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, noted. Later, he said, "The relationship ... and the coverage we have gotten, I don't think we should fake it."

It may have seemed that Trump was doing the nation an indirect service by skipping the dinner, and therefore reducing its hold on the D.C. political imagination. Yet, by framing the President’s absence as the result of his purported mistreatment by the press, the White House has only managed to make the dinner, and the central ideas that it furthers, seem more essential than ever. According to a recent "60 Minutes"/Vanity Fair poll, thirty-six per cent of Republicans and thirteen per cent of Democrats surveyed said that a free press "does more harm than good." The correspondents’ dinner offers a chance, once a year, for the chief executive to express solidarity with the work that journalists do. Each President who has appeared at dinners past was beset, at some point in his tenure, by scandal, and each at times bristled publicly about the media coverage he received. Yet each used the dinner as an opportunity to signal that he and the press that covered him had similar civic interests at heart. Bill Clinton, in 1997: "I thank you and come here to honor your indispensable part in our lively, two-hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old experiment in democracy." George W. Bush, in 2008: "What I like most about these evenings is the laughter, and the chance to thank you for the work you do for the country." President Obama, in his final appearance, last spring, said, "At home and abroad, journalists like all of you engage in the dogged pursuit of informing citizens, and holding leaders accountable, and making our government of the people possible." Whether or not the former Presidents were, to use Spicer's phrase, faking it, they were nonetheless performing a valuable public ritual—one that, like so many other traditions, Trump has seen fit to forgo.

If correspondents' dinners in the past overstated the warmth of the relationship between the President and the press, Trump's refusal to attend vastly overstates the hostility that he feels toward the news media. As Politico recently reported, and common sense long ago suggested, Trump doesn't actually hate the press; he craves the attention of reporters and solicits their attention behind the scenes, while branding them traitors in public. Trump could never muster a magnanimous word about the press, because he sees it not as a co-equal part of a functioning democracy but as a lever to be pulled in the service of his own image and power. His decision to skip the correspondents’ dinner, which he announced during his most heated public feuding with the press, seemed like a petulant power play—his attempt to cater to his anti-élite base and spoil the party at the same time.

His refusal to appear may also be a matter of personal vanity. His stilted performance at the Al Smith Dinner, last October, during which he delivered jokes with the meanness of Don Rickles but none of the charm, was met with open jeers; it may have been enough to scare him off attempts at comedy for good. Meanwhile, he must have surely seen a bludgeoning coming from whichever comedian ultimately agreed to host. (Alec Baldwin, who has rankled Trump with his impression of him on "Saturday Night Live," was rumored to be in the running.)

Undoubtedly, a correspondents' dinner without Trump defangs the drama and potential comedy of the night. Ratings are sure to suffer, especially with the President himself scheduling the counterprogramming. Even before Trump backed out, the search for a host was more protracted than usual, with the gig eventually going to Hasan Minhaj, the thirty-one-year-old comedian and "Daily Show" contributor. (The comedian Samantha Bee, who one imagines might be performing at this year's dinner had Hillary Clinton won the election, will be hosting a shadow event to protest the President.) Last June, Minhaj hosted the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner, a decidedly easier Washington ticket, where he remarked, "It is such an honor to be speaking at the correspondents' dinner that nobody cares about." That line might work again this year.

The President may try to spin his strategic retreat as a minor victory, but it will be an empty one. If he were a Marvel superhero, or super-villain, a key point in Trump’s origin story would be the 2011 correspondents' dinner, where President Obama's lavish mockery of Trump's political ambitions became, as the mythology now has it, the dark fuel for his eventual run for the Presidency. People in attendance noted Trump's beet-red face, his locked jaw, his frozen slouch as Obama deftly skewered him, referring to him dismissively as "the Donald." What greater thrill than to return triumphantly to the scene of his greatest public humiliation and deliver a few remarks from behind the Presidential seal? But even a night of gloating would require from Trump the kind of practical courage that he, until now, has failed to demonstrate. Instead, sensing a potential televised conflict, in which, for a time at least, he'd have to surrender the microphone to a hostile comedian, Trump ducked out, choosing instead to nurse his pride in the comfort of another campaign rally, playing to what comedians would call a friendly room.

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