Which brings us to journalists’ general silence when Trump and his lackeys say cruel things about Muslims, Mexicans, and immigrants. Journalists believe they must remain mum, lest they appear biased. God forbid one has a bias against racism; that must be an enormous handicap in performing journalism in a nation that is projected to not have a racial or ethnic majority within the next four decades. The same night that Wolf made her true statements at the correspondents’ dinner, Trump supporters at a Trump event booed the mention of “Hispanics,” literally condemning an entire ethnicity — for the second time in a single week. I suppose reporters do what they must to get the stories they can. But I’d encourage them to avoid signaling to the American people that you either don’t realize or don’t care that we are being lied to every day, that we can’t trust you to recognize authoritarianism and fascism when you see it, that you are so far removed from the life of “citizen” in your pursuit of information of these elites that when they’re separating us into Childless Unmarrieds and Women Deserving of Respect, you’re not going to sit by quietly, unable to speak out, lest you show “bias” that inhibits your ability to claim an EXCLUSIVE! SCOOP! handed to you by officials who have decided they’re okay with that information getting out.

Bullying happens along a gradient of existing power and reiterates it. That’s the difference between bullying and a fair fight: The bully is bigger and stronger and safer, and wields those advantages over someone smaller and weaker and more vulnerable. Michelle Wolf got off some zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s expense at an ultra-exclusive social event entirely filled by people whose livelihoods Sanders holds in her hands. Beyond that, as a basic function of her job, Sanders enjoys access to the water main of American political consciousness unmatched by pretty much any living person not named Donald Trump—a privilege she uses only and entirely for the purpose of pumping poison into it, aided by a healthy plurality of the people in that room but not by Michelle Wolf. I doubt there is a forum in existence in which Wolf could do anything that would qualify as “bullying” the press secretary of the President of the United States, but even if there is, the fucking White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t it.