By Chuck Raasch

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner has come to violate what was once a first tenet of journalism: Try not to make yourself part of the story.

You may have heard or even tuned into live coverage of “nerd prom,” that annual event of a few people who cover the White House and thousands of hangers-on, an event President Donald Trump has now twice skipped to mock from afar. The association of journalists has hired comedians, like Saturday night’s 15-minutes-of-famer Michelle Wolf, to mock the glitz surrounding the dinner as Exhibit A of the swamp.

Journalists who constantly critique the “optics” of the people they cover have watched as a dinner that is supposed to honor probing journalism and award aspiring journalists with scholarships strays far from its original meaning into the swamps of partisanship.

Somehow the Kathy Griffins of the world have been allowed to hijack it. (The Washington Post had a day-later feature about how the comedian who posed with a figure of a beheaded Trump had the run of this year’s dinner because so few of the Hollywood elite showed up).

This column is not about recommending the dinner’s demise, or how it ought to be re-thought — although a good start would be a nice dinner with wounded warriors from Walter Reed and other military hospitals as guests instead of D-listers and news groupies who don’t know the Oval Office from Ovaltine.

C-SPAN would certainly cover it, but the cable newsies might have to find different programming if it didn’t glitter or get down in the mud enough. It could be a dinner in which the mic was taken from comedians seeking to make a splash in the culture swamp and given to the aspiring journalists instead.

The world has enough red carpets and D-Listers already. And journalists don’t need to hire comedians to tell us how messed up politics is or critique how the press covers a president who has declared the press enemies of the American people. The experts on social media tell us that every day.

This column is written far from that dinner, which the author did not attend. It’s about how this president has, in the span of two-plus years, turned American institutions upon themselves.

By now it should be abundantly clear: The campaign chaos that helped elect Trump is his governing philosophy. This president is at his most powerful when he has others at others’ throats.

It has paid policy and political dividends for Trump and, at times, for the American people. A de-escalation agreement on the Korean peninsula, if it becomes a reality after years of lies and false promises from the North Korean to a parade of previous presidents, would come about, in part, because President Trump pitted China against North Korea, resulting in pressure from Beijing.

Trump’s got NATO squabbling in house. Will it strengthen or weaken the alliance? At the very least, it’s put a spotlight on the financial contributions of NATO allies.

At home, internecine fights within American institutions are the direct result of Trump’s actions and words.

There’s the FBI, where Trump and his allies have tried to divide the leadership from the rank-and-file in a self-preservation response to Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. On any given prime-time show, count how many times Trump mouthpiece Sean Hannity attacks FBI leadership while pointedly saying they are different from the good men and women of the FBI who work for you and me.

There’s religion, where evangelical leaders support Trump because of his position on tax cuts or abortion despite allegations of sexual assault or adulterous behavior that include an affair with a porn star. They’re at odds with other people of faith who say the crass and demeaning language toward immigrants, women, political foes and others is all of a parcel of policies that hurt the poor and powerless. Agree with Trump or not, it’s hard to dispute that politics and religion has become an even more toxic mix under this president.

And there’s journalism, a profession that had been under attack, financially and culturally, before Trump. Now we have a president who eschews facts for a reality that he defines, whose pattern of attacking and dividing the press has played out from Day One, the day he sent out his press secretary to lie about the size of his inauguration crowd in defiance of clear evidence anyone with an objective eye could see.

Now that former press secretary, the book-hawking Sean Spicer, feels emboldened to call the White House Correspondents Dinner a “disgrace” on Twitter.

That’s the genius of Donald Trump. He’s used the greatest bully pulpit in the history of the world to push us all to a place where objective reasoning is nearing impossibility.

We don’t need comedians to tell us the danger of that.