Conversations around The Post, Steven Spielberg’s film about The Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971, have often turned into conversations about Donald Trump’s White House—which is not exactly unintentional. The current administration has made a mission out of discrediting modern media outlets, going so far as to announce farcical awards for the “most dishonest & corrupt” publications of the year. It has positioned itself as an enemy of the free press to the extent that The Post, a movie about a decades-old decision to tell the truth in the face of a corrupt government, feels inordinately timely.

This is why it’s so deeply confusing to learn that Trump’s team has reportedly requested to screen the film at the White House and at Camp David, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Either someone in the establishment is trying to trick the White House into learning some decency toward the media, or irony is officially dead.

Per T.H.R., the White House has indeed been granted access to the film, which hit theaters back in December. The president will reportedly be in the White House and Camp David over the weekend for a summit with G.O.P. lawmakers.

There are more layers to this thing than a schichttorte (apologies to those of you who don’t watch The Great British Bake Off), starting with the fact that Trump, particularly at the start of his presidency, has drawn more than a few comparisons to Richard Nixon. The stars of The Post, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, have also publicly positioned themselves as anti-Trump; just a few weeks ago, Hanks even said that he would not be interested in screening The Post for this White House, quickly rattling off a list of unnerving reasons why.

“I don’t think I would,” he told T.H.R. “Look, I didn’t think things were going to be this way last November. I would not have been able to imagine that we would be living in a country where neo-Nazis are doing torchlight parades in Charlottesville [Virginia] and jokes about Pocahontas are being made in front of the Navajo code talkers.”

Streep herself was attacked by the president last winter, after she delivered a fiery speech about his behavior while accepting a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes (all without openly saying his name). The next day, Trump responded by flinging a few tweets out into the universe, as he is wont to do, calling Streep an “overrated” actress and a “Hillary [Clinton] flunky.”

So this screening is strange optics, to say the least—though if anyone could benefit from a screening of The Post, it’s Trump. Perhaps, then, this is all the work not of a Trump official, but rather by some desperate lame-duck intern who found a way to get screening approval before peacing out of the White House for good—kind of like the guy who momentarily disabled Trump’s Twitter on his last day at the tech company. Who knows!