Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

Drinks in hand, anxious media people braved a series of events in the nights before the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Jesse McKinley, The New York Times, April 26, 2025

It was just like Omaha Beach. Only more dangerous. Each elite DC journalist is a hero.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a pathetic event that was as dishonest as Karoline Leavitt’s White House briefings.

The dinner began with White House Correspondents’ Association President Eugene Daniels delivering an Academy Award-type speech about all of the people who helped Eugene Daniels reach the presidency of the White House Correspondents’ Association, where Fox News gets to pretend they are something they deny in court: journalists. In fact, the only people in the world who consider Fox News propagandists journalists are the members of the White House Correspondents’ Association with Fox News being the dissenting voice. Under oath, Fox News admits what they are.

Next, MSNBC’s Daniels declared:

What we are not is the opposition, what we are not is the enemy of the people and what we are not is the enemy of the state.

This statement is perfectly true. Though partners can find themselves in opposition, the Trump partnership with America’s corporate media is rock solid.

The American corporate media are Donald Trump’s indispensable partners. They are his foils, his amplifiers and his enablers.

Trump calls The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman—the Walter Duranty of the 21st century—his “psychiatrist.”

She has done for Trump what Duranty did for Stalin.

Haberman hid the truth behind trivia that they both called news.

Both denied the reality of what was happening, and reported that what was so, was not. In the end, Haberman, just like Duranty, accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a catalogue of omissions perversely called news.

The relationships between the media and Trump are mostly performative, deeply incestuous and profoundly corrupt.

The ostensible purpose of the WHCD is to hand out scholarships to students and awards to journalists from other journalists in what is a type of participation trophy industrial complex.

Axios’ Alex Thompson received an award for his coverage of Joe Biden’s decline.

His reporting on the subject was fearless, honest, direct and accurate.

The public had a right to know, and Alex Thompson was among the most persistent truth tellers about the disastrous cover-up that opened the gates to the current insanity and danger.

During his speech he said that he was “damn proud” of his forthcoming book co-written with Jake Tapper of CNN, where Thompson is a contributor—alongside Scott Jennings.

When Thompson accepted his award he said the following:

Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsible for faith in the media at such lows.

Some responsibility?

Truth tellers?

There has been very little truth telling from the American media as a broad institution in quite a long time.

In fact, it’s why the American Republic is in grave danger.

The story was not missed.

The story was not reported. Period.

It was not reported because of the effectiveness of the intimidation campaign ran from the Biden White House and the fear of consequences for confronting the story head on by the corporate media that lives and breathes on its access to power.

It’s a deranged form of show business.

Maybe, one day, truth telling can be studied at the Trump Presidential Library in a special room paid for by the $15 million that ABC News gave Trump when he shook them down.

Let’s not pretend that Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, didn’t engage in a corrupt act when he gave $40 million to Melania Trump for a documentary about Melania, around which there is zero general interest. It should be noted that following the $40 million payment to Melania that Jeff Bezos secured his first Pentagon contracts for Blue Origin.

This raises a question: how does The Washington Post spell ‘quid pro quo?’

Here is a simple truth: the American media were part of the Biden cover-up, which was led by Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski.

They set the tone and permissible boundaries of debate on what was once the most watched and relevant morning daily show for America’s political and business ‘machers.’

This is the most hideous lie told by any person at any network looking into a camera with a position of public trust outside of denialism about the outcome of the 2020 election, or Orwellian lying about January 6, 2021.

In other words, the most dishonest moment on American television in 25 years that wasn’t seen on Fox News was seen on MSNBC. It came from a man who loves canoodling power for $8 million a year—much more than he does truth telling.

Do Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson think the cover-up included the powerful media presenters who disciplined the rest of the media and every feckless Democratic member of Congress with their aggressive belligerence and Karoline Leavitt-level zealotry?

Let’s watch Joe Scarborough tell his audience “f@#k you“ in a broadcast first, as he gaslights them in an act of unparalleled abuse:

Scarborough called Trump a Nazi, then rushed to Mar-a-Lago after the election, and became the first person to bend the knee to Trump.

Alex Thompson gave a fine speech, but truth tellers must tell the whole truth. They can’t gloss over it in convenient shades, and reveal it from the shadows, where the lighting shades what must be seen clearly.

The cover-up by Joe Biden’s team could not have worked without people like Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Jen Psaki, Tim Miller, and many others shouting down the truth and smearing the shit out of anyone—including me—who dared tell it to you.

The conduct was reprehensible. The damage it did to America was incalculable.

I have some questions:

When might the American people be told the truth?

When might they be told that they are in danger?

When might there be fierce questions asked of Donald Trump? Elon Musk? Pete Hegseth?

A review of one week’s worth of interrogatories to White House officials by the members of the White House correspondents show the inanity, sycophancy, kowtowing, corruption and incompetence that confronts Trump on a daily basis.

America has a First Amendment, but woefully few fearless practitioners of it.

Any network that tolerates Scott Jennings should give its leading voices pause before delivering lectures about truth telling.

Telling truths with omissions is called quibbling. It is a different form of lying, just not as aggressive as looking into the camera and demanding people believe the smaller crowd size is bigger, like NewsNation’s Sean Spicer did, or the historic “f@#k you” that MSNBC’s Scarborough delivered.

It’s all the same.

That is the whole truth, and you deserve it.

The Warning is a place where the truth is treasured, protected and respected.

It’s why I would have been so deeply uncomfortable sitting in a room of capitulant fools and hedging sycophants who think they are the center of the world—as opposed to being at the center of America’s miseries.

In the end, the most important truth of the night is the most obvious one: Trump couldn’t have done any of it without his partners in America’s corporate media. They are the wind beneath his wings.