Splinter: Nerds Attend Prom With Trump as the Chad Fed Fights Back and Wins

One of the consistent lessons of Trump 2.0 is that weak baby losers who capitulate to the most incompetent authoritarianism of all time keep losing, while those who stand up to a demented bully stay winning. Major law firms Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Susman Godfrey took Trump to court and won, and then they took major clients from losing losers Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis who offered billions in pro bono deals to Trump, then kept getting bullied for more. Harvard fought Trump’s cash grab, won and got its grant money back, while Columbia University paid him $200 million before Trump came back and tried to shake them down for another $1 billion. Iran’s new regime has called about five of Trump’s ceasefire bluffs by now as Trump’s war aims pivot to undo the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused by his war. There is very clearly a playbook to beat Trump and there is only one play in it: stand up for yourself.

Only a fucking idiot who cannot or will not learn from history would keep bending the knee to Trump as his polls collapse to new lows, which brings me to the White House Correspondents’ Association. Today brings another stark contrast between those Americans born with spines in their bodies and the vast sea of power and capital who revealed themselves to be yellow to their very cores over the past year. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or “nerd prom” as the press affectionately calls it, will take place tomorrow, the day after Trump’s Department of Justice dropped their bullshit inquiry into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. It was an intimidation tactic that tried to force him to lower interest rates or resign so Trump could appoint someone who would. 

Powell came into the normie limelight when he stood next to Trump last year and realized he had been led into a trap, then he simply stated that Trump was lying on live TV about the Fed renovations they were touring that would become the basis of this empty DOJ threat. Normies who rightly don’t know or care who runs the Fed came to see this longtime Republican appointed by Trump to be a hero, as the bar set by cowardly universities like Columbia and other feckless fraidy cats terrified of a sundowning Florida man lay six feet below the ground. Simply saying “I haven’t heard that” to Trump’s face in the beginning of his second term was a revolutionary act thanks to the rank cowardice of so much American power who were all too happy to abandon any concept of pride or self-worth to kiss dear leader’s feet like so many other My Pillow customers. We should never, ever forget the people in power who told us who they are last year. They all wear this Schumer-styled stain forever, and many will not be able to wash it off their fancy clothes at nerd prom tomorrow night no matter how hard they try.

Much of the people higher up in mainstream media’s organizational charts have revealed themselves to be on the capitulatory side of things, and the stenographic editors at outlets like the New York Times have functioned as Trump’s PR team of sorts, giving some level of credence to his invented reality day after day. This was recently punctuated in an all-timer of an “experts say” cop-out, as the Times wrote a real-life headline of “FEMA Official Says he Teleported to Waffle House. Experts Are Dubious.” Thank goodness the Times was able to find experts to clear that up for their confused team of editors! Can’t let anything past their leadership without giving it that bothsides shine in yet another day of work deciding that there is no such thing as objective reality (unless Israel tells them otherwise).

Jake Tapper and other Very Serious scolds in media have long looked forward to nerd prom as a highlight of their year, a night they say they get to cut loose and have fun sniffing their own farts in one big room together as they all talk about how important and Very Serious they all are. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has long been one big exercise in Beltway media unearned self-flagellation, and the last time this gluttony was of any use came when Stephen Colbert literally spoke truth to power in 2006, and the Very Serious Media responded by scolding him for making fun of a war criminal for a wildly unpopular war (and those Very Serious People who didn’t scold Colbert didn’t even include it in their writeup of an event no one can remember a thing about outside of Colbert’s performance). Now these professional stenographers plan to party at prom with a president who is less popular than he was after he tried to stage a coup, what Very Serious People they all are!

Trump is planning to go on a tirade against the fake news media attending the same party with him, and the Tappers of the world are reportedly deliberating about how to deal with it. Should they walk out? Shout back? Point to their First Amendment pins demonstrating how Very Serious they are about this life of fancy journalism cosplay they have chosen for themselves? But what if this unruly display makes them look biased! Or human! Oh no! Then the American people won’t trust them anymore! Someone get Jake Tapper his fainting couch he only uses after spreading lies about Muslim women that his colleagues have to correct on their own shows!

it’s just so funny that the president is going to host a “every last one of you can go fuck yourself” party in a city with lots of fun things to do and yet there are ostensibly adult professionals wandering around their newsrooms in a fugue muttering about how this is such a conundrum

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— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 12:13 PM

New York Times editors are hemming and hawing over how much credence to give claims of teleportation as they send reporters to an event that will justify the legitimacy of an autocrat who is only there to try to kill what they say is their professional calling. There is a real live Chad vs the virgin meme unfolding in the wild this weekend. Powell practiced the basic tenets of journalism for months on end, pointing to the misery of the 1970s as the reason why he won’t capitulate to Trump’s demand to repeat those mistakes, while calmly explaining to the world why what Trump is saying is simply not true.

“Not true,” is not in any major media headline writer’s vocabulary, and this crew has proven that they look at their primary job as bothsidesing their reporters’ often very good work at uncovering the truth. So much of major media’s product in Trump 2.0 has been defined by good to great articles written by underpaid and underappreciated journalists not mincing words about what Trump and his minions have done, only to have some mealy-mouthed “experts say” bullshit slapped on to its title or subhed by a braindead editor who wakes up every day and proves to the world that they are fundamentally not made for this moment. Then the internet yells at the writer for a headline they didn’t write that doesn’t accurately represent an article the internet didn’t read while the editor goes on to do this shit again and again and again. No wonder Trump has been the media’s assignment editor for a decade and counting.

This is all so stupid, which is another way of saying it is exactly on brand for a corporate media who has long lost the plot about what they actually do on a daily basis, and the impact their work has on our deteriorating politics that has been taken over by the biggest bad faith actors of a generation. Trump’s entire strategy revolves around constantly lying to a media whose base political worldview is akin to thinking that professional wrestling is real, and it works like a charm. Jerome Powell calmly said what Trump said was not true on live TV, then held firm against a baseless investigation until his allies in Congress found a point of leverage and used it. Powell didn’t have to do anything other than simply and consistently state what reality has proven to be and he won, all while America’s Very Serious self-appointed truth-tellers are volunteering to be humiliated by Trump in front of the entire world tomorrow night.