THE NEW YORK TIMES: Donald Trump to dine with reporters at White House Correspondents’ Association dinner

When President Donald Trump makes his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night, he will be addressing a roomful of people he spent the week attacking.

Of all the moments for him to be socialising with the journalists who cover him, this one in particular makes for especially discordant timing.

Hardly a week goes by that Mr Trump does not let loose on the news media, but even measured against his own standards, his attacks in the five days leading up to the dinner were vituperative and verbose.

There’s no mystery why. He explains it himself. As his war with Iran beats on, his frustration with how it’s been covered has crescendoed.

“I’m winning a War, BY A LOT,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday. But, “if you read the Fake News,” he said, “you would actually think we are losing the War.”

That cri de coeur turned out to be an amuse-bouche. The rest of the week brought with it hundreds and hundreds of words from the commander in chief, all aimed at what he characterised as a moronic and corrupt news media working as one against him.

Here are some of the things he said this past week about the institutions being celebrated at the black-tie dinner at which he will appear with his wife Saturday:

“THE WALL STREET JOURNAL HAS LOST ITS WAY!” he wrote Tuesday. “No longer required reading,” he declared, “just another failing political ‘RAG!’” He inveighed against his frenemy Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owns that broadsheet.

Mr Trump had plenty of words to say about The New York Times this past week, none of them nice. As for The Washington Post? “Now almost defunct, fortunately,” he wrote Monday.

That characterisation came in a post about what he called “the Anti-America fake News Media” that “is rooting for Iran to win.”

In the president’s telling, those who produce these reports and others like them are “unpatriotic people,” as he put it in one of his posts. So then why show up to a dinner honouring their work?

“I know the president is very much looking forward to it,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on the White House driveway Friday afternoon.

The last time Mr Trump attended this event was in 2015. He skipped it all four years of his first term, and he stayed away last year, too. This will be his first time attending as president, Ms Leavitt said Friday.

“His speech will be very entertaining, that is what I will tell you,” she said happily. “So everyone should tune in!”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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