CNN Invites Trump Campaign Honcho To WHCD After Years Of Trump Estrangement Syndrome

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Chris LaCivita is a lead strategist for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for president and, for those old enough to recall, notorious for leading the “Swift Boat” campaign against 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry. He will also be a guest of CNN at this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The network bore the brunt of Trump’s “fake news” attacks on the media, whose hosts and anchors regularly describe Trump as a pernicious threat to democracy, and who were so furious at former honcho Chris Licht invited Trump for a town hall that they pushed for his ouster, is now hosting one of his top aides at D.C.’s biggest night.

Politico Playbook broke the news on Thursday in a piece outlining the guests for each major media outlet. The CNN entry read:

CNN: Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN, White House Cabinet Secretary EVAN RYAN, senior Biden campaign aide MIKE DONILON, Illinois Gov. J.B. PRITZKER, Trump strategist CHRIS LaCIVITA, Rep. DARRELL ISSA (R-Calif.), Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs DAN KOH and RACHEL BROSNAHAN

When reached for comment, a CNN spokesperson told us, “We regularly invite guests to join us at the White House Correspondents Dinner from multiple political campaigns and viewpoints, and in this presidential election year, we extended invitations to members of both campaigns.”

Of course, media outlets regularly invite guests from across the political spectrum, from heads of state to reality TV stars, to seats at their tables for dinner. Mediaite also understands that CNN invited the two chief strategists from both campaigns: Mike Donilon from the Biden campaign will also join CNN. (There is no word about a planned arm-wrestling competition between LaCivita and Donilon, but dinner guests can only hope!)

The apparent mini-detente between the Trump camp and CNN comes at a venue that the former president treated with disdain. Only five years ago, then-President Trump ordered all officials and campaign staffers to not attend the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Dinner in protest of whatever he was aggrieved about at the time. LaCivita’s attendance — as guest of CNN of all outlets — will certainly raise some eyebrows, if not questions, about how the Trump campaign and CNN intend on engaging in the coming months, if not years.

One can imagine the invite sparking outrage among those CNN staffers who were in open revolt over the Trump town hall roughly a year ago.

But, CNN is likely the one cable network that could — and should — have the chief strategists from each nominee’s campaign, at least in normal and less bitterly divided times. Some might see this invite as some sort of olive branch to Team Trump, designed to lead to less hostility from the 45th president. The odds of that coming to fruition seem as long as each of us winning the lottery.

The invitation also raises questions for the Trump campaign. As one former Trump advisor told Mediaite: “LaCivita’s embracing chief enemy number one is weird. Trump’s allowing it is weirder.”

To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it’s difficult not to see some meaning in CNN’s invite to a chief architect of the campaign of someone portrayed as a threat to American democracy by many of its top talking heads.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.