Amber Ruffin’s firing from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, after her making comments critical of President Trump and his administration, has been met with a by-now familiar silence. Perhaps it’s because the annual dinner is seen as a venal and silly gathering; perhaps it’s just that, in an onslaught of rapid change across our culture, this is just another data point. But it deserves notice as yet another instance of an institution bowing to pressure from the White House in the executive branch’s attempt to govern how all of us may speak.
Ruffin had, prior to her firing, rebuked the idea that she should be equal in her criticism of both sides of the aisle. “There’s no way I’m frickin’ going to be doing that, dude,” she said in a podcast interview with the Daily Beast. She added, “They [Trump administration officials] want that false equivalency that the media does. They want that. It feels great. It makes them feel like human beings. But they shouldn’t get to feel that way, because they’re not.” On a segment on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” last night, Ruffin played at having learned her lesson. Her critique of one side over another, she said, was wrongheaded. “When bad people do bad things,” she said, “you have to treat them fairly and respectfully. When you watch ‘The Sound of Music,’ you have to root for the singing children, and the other people.”
The Nazis, in other words. This is indeed a sharp take. And yet consider the idea that Ruffin ought to be as critical of Republicans as of Democrats — well, only one of those two parties has any meaningful power right now, and only one is resetting practically every element of American life. That reset has included remarkable use of what the White House perceives to be its power to control institutions via executive order, a development that has led major law firms and research universities (to say nothing of Congressional Democrats) to accede to Trump’s agenda. Can a comedian not speak hyperbolically about a political moment that seems to demand hyperbolic terms?
Evidently not. In a statement, the White House Correspondents’ Association’s president, Eugene Daniels, wrote in part, “At this consequential moment for journalism, I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.” By pulling an entertainer who might be expected to criticize the President, Daniels has instead announced that he is glad to be a part of the politics of division, so long as he’s on the winning side.
After all, there has been plenty of invective, and partisanship, from the WHCD podium in the past — the evening seems designed to prove any given commander-in-chief’s commitment to the concept of free speech. This has been true in the past, as when Stephen Colbert’s sensational 2006 roast of George W. Bush — performed in-character as a conservative pundit praising the increasingly unpopular President — crystallized the moment that Bush, unloved and flailing in his second term, became a lame duck. Elsewhere, Michelle Wolf, in 2018, drew headlines for its sharp and direct criticism of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. It is certainly possible, too, for the President to join in on the action and match speech with speech, as in 2011, when President Barack Obama’s address from the podium, in which he filleted celebrity guest Donald Trump, is said to have been the moment Trump made up his mind to someday run for President.
In the past, such moments have been possible because of the willingness of journalists to push back against power. The White House Correspondents’ Association can have been fairly critiqued for their vanity as they threw an annual celebrity-driven party in honor of their own work, but they have been, in their way, brave enough to put on a show.
It’s worth remembering, though, that said fearlessness has had limits: The year after Wolf’s controversial set, the Association hired the historian Ron Chernow to deliver a lecture rather than a comedian, as if to sidestep the possibility of further angering Trump. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, for all that it has provided some genuinely consequential moments in our shared cultural history, has been critiqued for many years as vacuous, silly — the kind of party to which, in 2011, a reality-TV star would get an invitation. And decisions like cancelling comedy for a year after Wolf or, particularly, cancelling Ruffin in advance help to make that case.
They also advance the idea that so-called “cancel culture,” the bugbear of the right, never went away — it just flipped its polarity. Now, entertainers as well as premium lawyers and Ivy League colleges can face effective deletion for not towing a particular party line. And unlike the haziness of what it meant to be culturally cancelled in, say, 2013, the consequences now are clear. The journalists covering the White House have decided, in hosting their big night out, to accept a new natural order in which the Presidency determines every aspect of American life, even the jokes one is allowed to hear. This would not seem to be a media class ready for the next three-plus years of life under a political regime determined to upend every norm; instead, as proven by the lack of outcry over Ruffin’s firing, they’re just like the rest of the populace, vaguely shell-shocked by the pace and magnitude of new mandates from the executive branch. And if they can’t handle the idea of Trump getting angry about the comic they’d already booked to address his policies, then there’d seem precious little to celebrate about their work, or their existence as anything other than tenured members of an industry dying by its own complacency, at all.
