In breaking with the longstanding tradition of attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), Pres. Donald Trump has shown that he is an unusually thin-skinned and “snowflake-y” president, said a panel on CNN Saturday afternoon.

“This is a data point in a larger trend,” said anchor Brianna Keilar. “There is this big divide in that the press is being demonized by Pres. Trump in ways, but he’s being dishonest himself about some things.”

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“Republicans always criticize the media,” said New York Times TV critic Bill Carter, author of The War for Late Night. “This has reached a point where it’s over the top, actually. Any story that’s critical of him now becomes ‘fake.'”

“And I think the fact that he’s bowing out of this dinner,” Carter continued, “it has a little bit of the quality of ‘You can’t fire me, I quit.’ because a lot of people are dropping out of this dinner.”

The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg Media have all canceled events around the 2017 WHCD because of the president’s repeated attacks on the media and his declaration that journalists are “the enemy of the American people.”

Obama, Carter said, “has been brilliant at these dinners.” Trump would have received criticism for failing to measure up. Also, the WHCD crowd is “not his crowd,” Carter said. “He likes to have paid applauders.”

“The whole thing would have been fraught for him,” Carter said. “And I know there’s been a lot of criticism of Democrats for being ‘snowflakes,’ but it’s sort of snowflake-y to me, to back out of this.”

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