Historian at press dinner: Trump 'steeped in venom'

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Historian Ron Chernow says presidents have always had differences with the press, but “they don’t need to be steeped in venom.”

Chernow was the featured speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night. The author of “Alexander Hamilton” represented a major change for the dinner, which in recent years has hired comedians as speakers.

President Donald Trump has refused to attend during his time in office and has called the media “enemies of the people.”

Chernow says “relations between presidents and the press are inevitably tough, almost always adversarial.”

In fact, he says, President George Washington also felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta.

10:30 p.m.

The leader of the White House Correspondents’ Association says President Donald Trump’s nicknames of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” for the media does not make them “pet names, punchlines or presidential.”

This came at the organization’s annual Washington dinner on Saturday night. Trump and members of his staff including press secretary Sarah Sanders, skipped the dinner to attend a Wisconsin rally. Sanders was lampooned at the dinner last year in a way some found harsh.

Instead of a comic, historian and author Ron Chernow was the main speaker at the dinner.

The organization’s president, Olivier Knox, also read aloud a letter from Austin Tice’s family urging dinner guests to advocate for his release. Tice is a freelance journalist who was kidnapped while reporting in Syria in 2012.