Guess who’s still coming to dinner?

All you worriers out there can relax: The White House Correspondents’ Association is standing firm. There will be a dinner next year and, yes, Donald Trump will be invited.

This from Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, the association’s new president, and fresh off duty on Trump’s decoy plane.

Heinrich was evidently not cowed by the arrest of some journalists practicing journalism, or the investigation of others. Nor was she dissuaded by Trump’s verbal abuse of her colleagues at the recent dinner … or any other time, I guess.
Heinrich told New York magazine’s Michael Calderone:

This dinner precedes President Trump. It will continue after President Trump. And we will invite the president no matter who the president is every year. I also think that for reporters who actually cover the White House and are in front of the president on a daily basis, the stuff that we heard that day is not a shock to us. This is someone we cover closely. Any number of us have had him push back or snap at a question that we’ve asked or made a comment.

This reminds me of Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness in the classic World War II movie “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” determined to build the bridge that would benefit his captors. It reminds me of the Stockholm Syndrome, of every functionary who defends the process at the expense of the goal.

Margaret Sullivan this week took the correspondents’ association to task for its tepid response to its journalists riding unwittingly on Trump’s decoy plane as he was surreptitiously spirited out of Turkey on another plane.

Its new president, Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox News correspondent, had a talk last week with White House officials to express the organization’s concerns and to suggest different protocols. She also sent an off-the-record memo to WHCA members explaining she had had a “candid and productive meeting” with White House officials.

And that, apparently, was that. A quiet meeting and a quiet memo - sadly weak - along the lines of all those pointless “thoughts and prayers” we hear about after a mass shooting.

Frank Figliuzzi, a longtime FBI special agent, sounded more outraged than the press association:

“Trump was the honored guest at the White House Correspondents Dinner on July 24. Less than three weeks earlier, he secretly left some of them to face death on an Air Force 1 targeted by Iran.”

But, this former FBI assistant director predicted, “they’ll invite him again next year.”

I have little doubt he’s right. As I wrote after this year’s dinner — where Trump verbally abused the reporters and their work, sometimes in extraordinarily personal terms — the WHCA has become an embarrassment and their annual dinner is a joke.

Yeah, Frank and Margaret called that one right.

The correspondents’ dinner is intended as a celebration of the shared value of free speech and the vital role of the press in a democracy. But when you invite the man actively dismantling it, you allow him to cosplay Friend of the First Amendment for one night before he returns to suppressing journalism.

What then are you celebrating, what shared value? Access to the president?

At this year’s dinner, Trump got to heap abuse on the press. Journalists endured it, and in return got to offer a pallid lesson on the First Amendment that fell on deaf ears. What did the public get?

Not to worry: Whatever happens to free speech, Heinrich assures us we’ll always have the dinner marking it.