Harry Truman’s dark quip — “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog” — is a staple of AP Government classes across the country, not only because of its obvious truth but also because D.C. is also very much a dog town. They love their dogs in the District. Congressmen and congresswomen famously take theirs to the office, and let them roam around the Capitol, and prowl the lawmaker’s offices and hideaways. Perhaps that is because people who are drawn to public service and policy, such as Truman, know real friends are hard to keep in a life devoted to politics. Dogs, meanwhile, are devoted for life.
Folks in the press fit this description well; many are quick to slice and dice, and swarm any scoop, no matter the cost. The best example of this is the legendary double cross of President Trump’s first West Wing gatekeeper, Madeleine Westerhout, who let her guard down and spoke too freely at a dinner fueled by too many drinks and perhaps not enough experience with the Sharpies of the White House press corps.
Westerhout has a new book out, “Off the Record: My Dream Job at the White House, How I Lost It, and What I Learned,” that details how she came to guard the door to Trump’s Oval Office. Before she was pushed out.
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Her rise always amazed me. She’s from Orange County, Calif., where I lived until my return to Washington in 2016. She went to high school with one of my children. I might have been the guest lecturer in her AP class, an annual appearance for a teacher I greatly admired (and with whom I disagreed on everything — but, of course, great government teachers are from all across the spectrum). I didn’t know Westerhout well, but well enough to greet her with genuine cheer when she was on the other end of the phone at the White House.
Perhaps I should have warned her about the city. About how “off the record” and “deep background” are as malleable as any soft metal, its meaning about as certain as a paper moon. About how quiet, on-the-road dinners with White House reporters are complicated minuets, best left to national security advisers and folks charged with handling reporters on a daily basis. In any case, Westerhout got burned. She talked at the supposedly private dinner about the Trump family. She doesn’t say exactly who broke the supposed ground rules of the dinner, but when the offending story finally appeared, she quickly resigned, though it is apparent from the book that then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney fired her. Who broke the rules? She doesn’t say. The press will never get to the bottom of that tale. Roadkill is something for someone else to clean up.
It’s gotten worse in these frenzied years. My columnist friend Salena Zito, who urged us all to take Trump “seriously but not literally,” was hounded by her critics on both sides — both for allegedly making up sources (a charge which I believe is garbage) and being so mildly pro-Trump. She finally gave up Twitter.
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Whatever it thinks of Trump, a large portion of the electorate will be voting this fall to rebuke the media’s descent into a sort of collective hatred of the president, the latest iteration of which saw a historic peace deal in the Middle East pushed offstage by anti-Trump talking points about the, wait for it, Post Office.
Share this articleShareIn 30 years of a radio and television career encompassing more than 25,000 interviews and twice as many callers, not one has concerned the Post Office. But this past weekend, newspapers all over the country gave uncommon weight to a third-tier story instead of a historic new entente between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. It was a genuine breakthrough that saw reliable Trump critics such as the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman and The Post’s David Ignatius saluting the president for setting off, to use Friedman’s description, an “earthquake” in the region.
A good earthquake, by the way — one that shatters the toxic status quo and opens many possibilities of real progress towards a regional accord.
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Westerhout’s book, which isn’t getting much attention, is full of never-before-seen glimpses of a side of Trump that isn’t covered. One to remember: He is very solicitous of his siblings, one of whom passed away this weekend. I would note that some of the “tell-alls” from the Trump Era that peddled dubious stories got huge play because they advanced a far more anti-Trump narrative.
Westerhout’s book strikes the opposite tone and focuses instead on the press. It is a reminder that the blowback against the media is building. When the audience vanishes, or another vote surprises, editors, columnists and reporters will be stunned. Again. Because they ignored the messages like those delivered by Westerhout: Trust once destroyed is difficult to rebuild.
Watch Opinions videos:
Read more:
Hugh Hewitt: The Israel-UAE agreement is Trump’s Nobel moment
Hugh Hewitt: Media, heal thyself. Before it is too late.
Rahm Emanuel: Will the news media make the same mistake this election?
Erik Wemple: The Grisham Watch: Off-the-record edition
E.J. Dionne Jr.: The media’s bias should be toward democracy
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