Oh, John Dickerson was in rare form here — that familiar blend of smug erudition and passive-aggressive Trump-bashing, wrapped in a sepia-toned “history lesson.”
The CBS Evening News Plus audience was treated Thursday to Dickerson’s musings on President Trump’s plan for a privately funded $200 million White House ballroom.
Rather than simply report it (or even critique it honestly), Dickerson reached back 185 years to dust off Martin Van Buren’s “Gold Spoon” scandal — the one where opponents mocked Van Buren as a pompous dandy strutting through the White House with, as Dickerson gleefully quoted, a “soul so diminutive it could pirouette inside a thimble.”
The message wasn’t subtle: Trump’s ballroom is Van Buren’s gold spoons. A gaudy symbol of decadence. A weapon for the opposition. Cue the self-satisfied smirk.
Except Dickerson’s high-minded historical parable falls apart the second you examine it. Many of Van Buren’s White House upgrades were, like Trump’s ballroom, privately funded. The so-called “extravagance” was largely political theater, and Dickerson knows that. But why let facts get in the way when you can analogize Trump to a doomed “peacock” and wink at your audience that this ballroom might cost him politically, too?
And notice the tell: Dickerson telegraphed his intent right up front. “His opponents wanted to turn the trappings of his office into a vulnerability,” he said of Van Buren. Then he spent the next several minutes doing exactly that to Trump. This wasn’t a history lesson. It was a roadmap — an open invitation for the press to make Trump’s privately funded project a scandal.
Here’s the reality: if a Democrat were privately funding a major White House upgrade, Dickerson would be lauding it as “a gift to the American people” and fawning over its symbolism. But because Trump’s name is attached, it becomes an occasion for a pompous lecture about political decadence, wrapped in pseudo-intellectual storytelling.
It’s not “The Gold Spoon Oration.” It’s The Cheap Shot Monologue.
