Transcript
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Charlie Sykes (1:20)
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. The war in Iran continues, although you wouldn't notice it because the President seems to want to talk about pretty much everything else. Kash Patel may actually be on the way out the door, and I don't think his performance on Saturday night is particularly going to be enhancing his standing with the White House. And speaking of Saturday night, we continue to have the fallout from the White House Correspondent's Dinner that didn't happen. That ended in chaos and tragedy. It could have been worse, but it gave Donald Trump an excuse to talk about his favorite subject, building a new ballroom. And joining us to start off the week is our good friend Anne Applebaum from the Atlantic. First of all, thanks for coming on the podcast again, Ann, thank you for having me. It seems unavoidable that we have to talk about what happened on Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Now, I think a lot of people thought that it was going to be kind of a farce, this sort of media political maga canoodling. It didn't actually happen. We had the gunman. But let's talk about this and the fallout from it. I want to get your take on the way Trump reacted and didn't react to what may or may not have been an assassination attempt on him. Your thoughts?
Anne Applebaum (2:42)
I agree with your original point. It was very striking that he immediately started talking not about his enemies on the left, which is what Trump, some around him, did, and what he would have done six months or a year ago. But he immediately started talking about the ballroom and needing to build the ballroom, which was peculiar, on a number of grounds. Number one, this was the White House correspondence dinner. It would never be held in the White House. It's hosted by the journalists, not by the president. And historically, it's the journalists inviting the president. And actually, I'll say a word for it. I've been to it a couple of times, and there is a nice theory behind it that it's, you know, it shows that there's a mutual respect for the press and for what it does, and that the press has some respect for politicians and believes that they're legitimate interlocutors and is thanking them for answering questions and so on. I mean, in a different era, you could see how this was a nice event, maybe small, maybe not for television to do once a year, but in the current context, it was pretty grotesque, the idea that the President was going to come and he was meant to make a speech attacking the press, and the press was going to somehow sit there and listen anyway. None of that happened. But I think the interesting point, as you say one, is that Trump immediately turned to describe himself as a martyr, himself as a great president. And now we need to build the ballroom. And the second thing I thought was interesting and this, I'm speaking to you from Poland, which is where I am at the moment. What I thought was interesting is how quickly the conspiracy theories started. And so this was online conspiracy theories that the. The shooter was a plant, that he was put there by Trump or by the Trump campaign in order to increase the president's popularity. And I'm only saying this because I had dinner with a friend of mine last night who's a kind of Polish intellectual, nothing to do with US Politics, doesn't have any. Anything to do with the White House or White House correspondents. And he immediately asked me whether I thought it was possible that this could be somehow fake. And I think that give a sense of how people around the world, not just in the United States, now read the news from Washington. Everybody takes a step back. Everybody asks whether this is real or not real. Nobody's sure of what's true and what isn't true.
