The Columbia Journalism Review sent a reporter to the farewell drinks party that White House reporters were throwing for Sarah Huckabee Sanders. One of the journalists there supplied this quote:
“Everybody has their issue with Sarah Sanders, but if you can’t have a drink with somebody, then all of civilization has broken down.”
Some people might have thought civilization was breaking down when sick children started dying in the cages where the government—the administration on whose behalf Sarah Huckabee Sanders spent 25 months variously lying to the public or refusing to speak publicly at all—was keeping them after taking them from their parents. Or well before that, even. It wasn’t a great sign for civilization, for instance, when Sanders used her position to lie, flamboyantly and contemptuously, about FBI agents having told her they’d supported the president’s decision to fire the FBI director.
Everyone knows this. In a better world, and occasionally in this one, people would refuse to share public space with someone like Sanders, who made the conscious choice to spend her days working to poison society. The journalists whose jobs (as they understood their jobs) required them to be in the same room as Sanders, and not to hoot in her face when she lied to them, ought to have celebrated her departure as a chance to finally turn their backs and stop treating her as if she were a decent human being.
But journalists at the party had, like the Trump apparatchiks they cover, already converted their shame into self-righteousness. They were just doing their jobs.
In a statement included in the CJR article, the White House Correspondents Association board member Todd Gillman declared that being a reporter means “you have to deal with all sorts of folks”:
“Journalists don’t decide who wins elections, and we don’t get a say in who the president hires. Our choice is to work with them, or do a really terrible job. That doesn’t mean there’s mutual affection or trust all the time. It just means there’s either a working relationship or no relationship.”
What it meant to “work with” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on her particular project, is a question that a lot of editors and reporters could have spent a lot more time thinking about. But the more immediately pressing fact about Gillman’s statement was that it did not explain why he felt like he had to attend Sanders’ farewell drinks. She was leaving! She’s going to be a private citizen now. It was not anybody’s professional duty to talk to her, or to perform sociability around her. She can drag herself off back to Arkansas by her lonesome.
The day before CJR watched as those “correspondents huddled to grab selfies with Sanders,” NBC’s Chuck Todd interviewed the president on Meet the Press. With the interview opportunity in the works, the week before, Todd had gotten himself to go quasi-viral by performing a commentary segment in which he denounced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling the administration’s detention camps for migrants, in which people, including children, are illegally crowded together in squalor and treated as legal nonpersons, “concentration camps.” It was wrong to use the Holocaust that way, Todd had said, as he used the Holocaust to show the White House he was willing to attack its enemies.
Having successfully locked down the interview, Todd chose to ask the White House about the fact that agents of Saudi Arabia—almost unquestionably acting on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—had, with extreme premeditation, ambushed and murdered a writer for the Washington Post and chopped his body into pieces for disposal, and the White House had done nothing about it. This is how NBC’s interview transcript went:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
Iran’s killed many, many people a day. Other countries in the Middle East, this is a hostile place. This is a vicious, hostile place. If you’re going to look at Saudi Arabia, look at Iran, look at other countries, I won’t mention names, and take a look at what’s happening. And then you go outside of the Middle East, and you take a look at what’s happening with countries. Okay? And I only say they spend $400 to $450 billion over a period of time —
CHUCK TODD:
So —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
— all money, all jobs, buying equipment —
CHUCK TODD:
That’s the price. As long as they keep buying —
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
No, no.
CHUCK TODD:
— you’ll overlook some of this behavior.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
But I’m not like a fool that says, “We don’t want to do business with them.” And by the way, if they don’t do business with us, you know what they do? They’ll do business with the Russians or with the Chinese. They will buy — We make the best equipment in the world, but they will buy great equipment from Russia and from China. Chuck —
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah. Alright.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
Take their money. Take their money, Chuck.
That was the end of that subject. The president could look a journalist in the face and say it was OK to murder another journalist, because the country that committed the murder is very rich, and our country wants their money. The next day, the journalists who cover the president would toast the president’s loyal press secretary, congratulating themselves on their willingness to uphold the fundamental values of civilization. And people accuse the press of being self-interested.
