Why a Legendary Washington Insider Is Dreading the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Juleanna Glover stands at the nexus of social and political Washington. As one of the city’s best-known conveners, she’s been a fixture at events around the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which during her 33 years working in Washington has evolved from a dinner to a weeklong cavalcade of networking, influence and money-making leavened by the occasional toast to a free press.

But this year, with the annual festivities back to their familiar frenetic pace, amidst a degree of back-to-normal excitement beyond anything in years, Glover is experiencing a distinctly unfamiliar feeling: Dread.

It has nothing to do with the virus or the war in Ukraine or even the superficiality that critics of the dinner have long denounced. Over the last few months, Glover has actually thrown book parties, hosted events, and otherwise gathered with the Washington village. Instead, it’s about politics itself and the whole idea that official Washington can get together and pretend that nothing’s changed.

After a career spent bringing together ideologically mixed crowds on behalf of high-profile corporate clients, the Republican staffer turned PR pro worries that Washington is too eager to get back to bipartisan socializing as usual—and, in its excitement at emerging from social lockdown, is ignoring what she sees as the lingering rot at the heart of democracy.

“It’s not still broken,” she says. “It’s more broken.”

“This is the first time this has happened in the post-Trump era, where it really is a moral question before the country,” Glover says of the dinner and the attendant corporate-sponsored parties, where for years reporters and advertisers have mingled with bigwigs from across the political spectrum. “The question is, can Washington normalize? In my brain and body it’s ‘I hope not,’ because if so, then we’re morally benumbed. On a weekend dedicated to freedom of the press, is it okay to raise a glass and toast with a seditionist?”

She’s talking about people who fueled, enabled or profited from a style of politics that destroys the very institutions the dinner is supposed to celebrate. You can’t, after all, undermine the system and then embed yourself in it. And for others to pretend that the dinner is a Big Tent covering all of Washington’s power centers—the falseness of the image rankles.

Among Washingtonians whose business involves working across party lines, Glover is unusual in her willingness to attach her name to the feelings. But I heard similar sentiments from a number of people this week as I went about the rituals of checking party schedules and hunting down errant cufflinks, chores that were interrupted for two years of pandemic cancellations, and that had previously been diminished by three years of relatively restrained party planning as the Trump administration largely boycotted the events.

Now, all of a sudden, the status quo ante is back. And though it’s the embrace of a pre-Covid normal that gets the attention—witness how the revived Gridiron Dinner turned into a super-spreader event, and the hubbub about whether Joe Biden’s WHCA appearance will put him at risk—it’s the return of the pre-2016 version of Washington, the party-hopping town of media-elite chumminess, that is stirring up complicated emotions: Given what’s happened since, is it okay to return to the old partisanship-stops-when-the-drinking-starts, everyone-can-come model?

Judging from the social calendar of the weekend, a sizable population of people seems to think the answer is: Hell, yes!

This year’s festivities look to be the most elaborate since the Obama years. Familiar stations of the cross, like the insider-heavy annual garden brunch at the former Katharine Graham home in Georgetown, will pick up where they left off. Other classics from the pre-Trump era are coming back to life after a longer break. After Trump’s election, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg pulled out of the exclusive afterparty they traditionally threw at the French ambassador’s residence. This year, the embassy soiree is back, now under the aegis of Paramount.

And there are also new events on the calendar: A get-together for the Semafor news organization being launched by former Bloomberg News chief Justin Smith and former New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, a gathering in the glitzy 16th Street headquarters of the Motion Picture Association, a space that opened up shortly before the pandemic.

Ironically, the tighter caps on attendance in the name of pandemic safety have increased the amount of jockeying for access to events like the one at MPA, which is known for drawing Hollywood celebs to D.C. “We’ve gotten so many unsolicited RSVPs from people who weren’t invited,” says Emily Lenzner, the association’s public-affairs chief. “I imagine the same is happening at the other parties. And I’m thinking, ‘How can you physically hit all these parties?’”

Of course, pretending to hate the WHCA falderal is as much a Beltway tradition as pretending to hate Washington itself. But what’s notable about the scrambled state of the capital in 2022 is the way the longstanding outsider critique—that there’s something unseemly about about powerful people and journalistic watchdogs all cavorting in a morally neutral environment, with corporate sponsors footing the bill—dovetails with the worries of someone whose business depends on their insider contacts like Glover’s.

Displays of insiderism will also be catnip for the right-wing media, where the working assumption is the media elite pulls punches on behalf of their Democratic pals, not merely on behalf of business-as-usual.

On that score, the return of dinner’s traditional program itself is a kind of ideological Rorschach test.

Consider the recent history. For years, the dinner featured a comedian. Then, in 2018, the WHCA apologized after comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a routine whose broadsides against White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sparked a conservative backlash. The association subsequently dispensed with the notion of an after-dinner comedian at all, instead hiring Hamilton author Ron Chernow to give remarks as a historian. But now, at the first dinner of the Biden administration, the yuks are back, with Daily Show host Trevor Noah set to present a monologue—and Jen Psaki, the current occupant of Sanders’ old job, is about to literally become an employee of the company hosting one the marquee post-banquet parties, NBC Universal. (Psaki will also be “in conversation” with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg as dinner-hour entertainment the previous night at the home of chairman emeritus and minority owner David Bradley, cohosted by majority owner Laurene Powell Jobs.)

WHCA president Steven Portnoy says the association didn’t give Noah any guidelines for what not to do.

Does the revival of comedy mean the WHCA no longer fears an off-the-rails standup act because they assume a TV host like Noah will go easy on the Democrats (and on the soon-to-be fellow TV host who serves as their White House spokeswoman)? Or does it mean that the association preemptively defanged its last dinner to appease team Trump, but doesn’t feel compelled to do that on behalf of Biden’s people? Your answer probably depends on your politics. (The real answer surely also involves the fact that the dinner-historian schtick was unpopular and the dinner has to sell tickets.)

It could be, though, that the very fact of bipartisan bread-breaking has itself become, paradoxically, partisan.