U.S. President Donald Trump was voluntarily absent from the head table on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton Hotel ballroom. And you can add this to the list of Trump administration accomplishments: In removing himself from the guest list, the president rendered the so-called nerd prom — the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner– irrelevant by boycotting the “once ultra-trendy, star-studded” event for three consecutive years.

Senior staffers also stayed home this time at the president’s direction.

Maybe if the group had toned down the Trump bashing (including personal attacks on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for example), things might have turned out differently. Previously dismissing the gala as boring, Trump held a rally in the important swing state of Wisconsin on Saturday night instead.

According to The Daily Wire, instead of hiring a liberal comedian to spew insults at Trump and others, the event “took on a funerary tone” with “dark sermons” with regard to “the state of the First Amendment and the all-encompassing fear journalists who cover the president are now feeling.”

That is just virtue-signaling fakery. Nor did it make the WHCA dinner great again.

Nothing that POTUS has allegedly done has prevented the mainstream media from staging an 24-7-365, anti-Trump infomercial. “It is worth noting that the White House has not, in fact, locked up any reporters, nor prosecuted even President Trump’s harshest critics,” the Wire added.

The self-serving, hopelessly biased globalist media also seems to think that it has a monopoly on the First Amendment.

Let’s stipulate that as the salesman in chief, Trump is hardly a detail guy, and his bombastic rhetoric is sometimes imprecise and needlessly combative. (For one thing, he should use more specific nouns than just “people” when he is referring to different groups or organizations in the same sentence.)

But he, like every American, enjoys freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution.

As Powerline explains about the feedback-loopy D.C. journalists:

“Reporters and editors pretend to believe that the First Amendment is somehow in danger from the Trump administration, but they know better. Their real complaint is that the president has used his own right of free speech to expose their mendacity.”

The nitpicking media also tends to accuse Trump of “lying” while he’s riffing, For eight years, these scribes said virtually nothing about Obama’s prevarications that had real-world consequences.

The media’s almost universal condemnation of Trump as a divisive politician also seems absurd. Is there anything more harmful to public discourse than Trump-hating news networks and other outlets working tirelessly to promote divisiveness within the country? You may have also noticed that anytime there is positive news for Trump, the Deep State will predictably leak some “damaging” information to the media to alter the news cycle.

Moreover, the Obama administration actually took steps to clamp down on the free flow of information.

Obama allegedly also tried to prevent whistleblowers from revealing government misconduct, The Mercury News explained.

“For nearly eight years, the Obama administration sought to cover up serial wrongdoing by waging a veritable war against the watchdog inspectors general of various federal agencies. In 2014, 47 of the nation’s 73 inspectors general signed a letter alleging that Obama had stonewalled their “ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.” The frustrated nonpartisan auditors cited systematic Obama administration refusals to turn over incriminating documents that were central to their investigations.”

[Featured image credit: BarBus/Pixabay]