See Chris and Jen instantly react to the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Thank you for watching for that. Now I'd like to bring in my colleague, Jen Psaki, host of the briefing with Jen Psaki and former press secretary to President Joe Biden. You kind of know this dynamic from both sides. You're someone who has been on sort of both sides of what can be a fraught dynamic is always sort of weird and complicated. And I think psychologically strange, you know, like what is that relationship? And it's adversarial, but you're human beings. You're spending time together. The things that Michael Isikoff was saying were true. It's sort of natural. But and yet we're in a completely different world now. And there's something strange about the juxtaposition of how different the world is and the room looking the same way, if I can say that right. That's kind of odd about this moment. No question about it. I mean, I will say not to make it less sexy than people make it seem. But most of the time, the source in the room is like the staff director for the Budget Committee who's sitting next to a reporter, an economics reporter from The Washington Post. And they're talking about the budget negotiations. And that informs the reporting. That's most of the time. And the vast majority of reporters in that room most of the time are not people who are easily swayed by people just because they had rubber chicken next to each other at a dinner. But yes, we're in a very different time right now. And as everybody has outlined through the course of your show, I mean, this is a president who has taken on the press attacks, the rights of the freedom of press, the right to free And now he's standing in this room and not standing currently. His eyelids are looking a little heavy, might I note. But you know, he's going to be standing in this room and delivering a speech to this group of people. The one thing I will say that I have noted, and I'd be interested if you agree or not, I mean, is a year and a half ago in the beginning of this administration, it was, I mean, we could do a story every single day about how the press were acquiescing, how major news organizations were acquiescing to the Trump administration from the Barry Weiss era, which we're still in, to ABC, to Jimmy Kimmel period of time. I do think we're seeing more pushback from news organizations punching back, including The New York Times and others. That's important to see. Are there exceptions to that? Is it enough? No. But it is a changing garden. A lot of those people are in the room tonight for that, too. I completely agree. I think that's true. I think that's true surveying the entire landscape of civic institutions in a free society, right? So like the law and the law firms and the universities and the press, right? There's all these things. There's like, you know, what makes up an open society? There's all these. There's the government. There's businesses. Right. And then there's this whole landscape that is all things that aren't one of those two things. And that's religious organizations and it's political parties, it's community organizations. And yes, I totally agree. I think, you know, the media is one of the tentpoles of that, but I think we have seen people get tougher. And honestly, you know, the irony here is for all the manipulation and browbeating of the press, for all the attempts to kind of control it through regulatory fiat, the guy's pulling at 34 percent this week. This is not been if the if the idea is we will control the press and our buddy Elon Musk owns Twitter and our other buddy is going to buy this and that's going to allow us to propagandize the American people who are going to love us like that is plainly not working. Right. It's not working. I mean, I also think and you talked about the journalists who are going to get awards tonight. And as we watch that, because I've sat through this many times, people should know that typically what happens is those awards are given out and then everybody on the dais, including the president, shakes the hand and congratulates the reporters who get the award. So we can watch for that and see if that happens. But Tyler Pager, Tyler Pager, the story and who you probably know, I mean, he's 31, 32 years old. He was a well-meaning, good reporter, thorn in my side when I was the White House press secretary because of his relentlessness in covering the Biden administration. Now he's getting an award for his reporting on the Trump administration. Things like how much the donations of Timothy Mellon to pay for troops, right. The behind the scenes story behind the Zelensky Trump meeting. These are things the public wants to know about. And he was also a reporter who received the subpoena just two weeks ago. And guess what he did today? He reported another story about the Qatari jet. Point is, like, I'm not sure a lot of these people are not exactly counting to Trump's efforts here. And you see that in evidence. Right. Yeah. We've also reached. We should just know we've reached the eye resting portion of the evening. Sometimes, you know, if you're standing for a long time, you get tired, you sit down, you rest your legs. Donald Trump's eyelids are like everyone else's legs. If he's if they're open, they start to get a little fatigued and he needs to rest them. Now, I will say I can't imagine something more boring to Donald Trump than people giving speeches about, like, the First Amendment and the power of the press and talking about things other than Donald Trump. So we're not surprisingly seeing him seeing him check out a bit. I do wonder, too, like, you know, the the the ownership structure part of this right is is interesting because that was the other thing that we saw early on was that, you know, take Disney, for example. Right. Disney settles that George Stephanopoulos lawsuit, which I think was a bad suit. You know, I don't have eyes into the internal deliberations out of it. I think it was a bad suit. They settled it. I think it set a bad mark. And Trump sort of lords it over them. Right. And I think Disney was scared at some level about reprisal from a government that they need regulatory things from that, that part of it at the highest echelons and levels also seems to be subsiding a lot. Like clearly that's still in the case with the Time Warner acquisition, with Paramount stuff like that. But again, more fight. Other parties now getting involved in trying to block that acquisition. Disney the second time around, just kind of like not taking Kimmel off the air and kind of brushing it off. Like there's there is a lot of that even at the highest level. That is true. Even at the highest levels and big corporate levels, not all of them, but certainly Disney's a good example. I also think we've seen I mean, Sarah Fitzpatrick story about Cash Patel from several weeks ago that the Atlantic put out that he threatened to sue them. Right. Then Jeffrey Goldberg came out with a scathing response and Sarah Fitzpatrick did another story about it. So even news organizations that aren't as enormous, that don't have the resources of an enormous corporate entity are also like, you know what, bully trying to take my lunch money. I'm not going to give you my lunch money because otherwise you're going to come back and ask for my lunch money again. And that's that's a good sign. Josh Dawsey, I believe, getting an award up there, a great reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I do feel duty bound to note as we talk how weird it would be if I just went like this while you're talking to me, like it would be strange. People would remark on it. It's it's become it becomes something that just happens all the time. But obviously, if anyone else did that or if you were in a meeting or in the middle of an interview and someone did that, it would be notable. You would remark on it. It would be notable, Chris, that we've sat on panels for hours and hours together watching a variety of events that could be described as not exactly earth shatteringly exciting at all moments. And neither of us have closed our eyes that I recall. But yes, that appears to be what's happening right now. What we're watching. So clapping aggressive. What do you what do you think about this sort of question about, you know, talk to reporters. I think you and I are in a different position. You know, we were we're sort of on networks and have shows that have sort of our names and our voices. And people are sort of watching us. It's like we were telling you what we think. Right. That's the that's the bargain. We have the viewer. Right. I'm going to tell you what I actually think. That's that's not true for a ton of people in the press and many people in the press are you know, that the sort of norms around what they're doing is they're not telling what they think. They're sort of reporting the facts. They're letting the story speak for itself. And there's a there's a feeling that Donald Trump wants to kind of go with war to war with the press to make them the enemy, because he wants to kind of make them seem politically toxic to the 40 percent of the country that sort of he has a lock on or the 38 or 34 percent and that the press does itself a disservice if they seem to be playing into going to war with him. That's one argument. The argument. The other side is it's kind of crazy when a person is going to war against you to sort of pretend like he isn't and kind of keep conducting business as normal. And again, I think there's sort of arguments on both sides. I think there are people with good faith and really people I respect who are in different parts of that debate, depending on where they are in the landscape. But what do you think about that debate? I mean, I think Trump is a dog that doesn't have very many new tricks. Right. And so he has long thought that if he bullies the press, they're going to acquiesce. And for a period of time, a number of organizations did. And in a relatively relatively recently, that is has been changing to some degree, as we've been talking about. One of the things I think is interesting in terms of how we talked about in the Oval Office today is he kind of suggested I'm not going. And he said this recently. I'm not going after the press. I'm going after the people internally. The press are just a means of getting there. And this is also their argument around the lawsuits. Right. And sweeping up journalists in that. I think that's total BS. But it's almost like he's changing his own spin to try to say because maybe he recognizes he's losing this a bit. Well, let's just say and on this note, no one is more obsessed with the press. And kind of loves the press in a weird, fetishistic way than Donald Trump, who is like has been has been a press hound his entire life, has been called people up with a fake name, John Barron, a work that was constantly tabloids like loves reading about himself like no one has a more dysfunctionally obsessive, fetishistic focus on media, press coverage, press than the individual on your screen right there. Like this is someone who cares more than anyone ever should care, frankly, about stuff. Yes. He wants to be loved so much, you know. And I always think about when he met with Barack Obama in the Oval Office right after he got elected in 2016. And he kept asking him, how are you so popular? Not about a lot of other things that you might want to know if you're an incoming president, right? Because he wants to be loved. Right. That's it. Nuclear codes work.