Journalists court criticism when they fail to ask subjects of their reporting for comment. Shirish Dáte, a White House reporter for the progressive news site HuffPost, appears to have the opposite problem: He gets clobbered when he does reach out.
Top Trump officials, Mr. Dáte said, tend to reply with insults, often bundled with praise for their boss. Never were they more newsworthy than a recent back-and-forth that spread across the internet.
After President Trump said he would meet with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in Budapest, Mr. Dáte (pronounced dah-tay) asked who had recommended the Hungarian capital for a high-stakes meeting.
“Your mom did,” texted Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, in an exchange that she later posted online. “Your mom,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, texted moments later, invoking a well-worn maternal insult that, according to the Urban Dictionary, is the “most versatile dis/comeback ever created in the history of your mom.”
“I was kind of like, this is a serious war that’s going on that has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians in their homes,” Mr. Dáte, 61 — who worked at several mainstream outlets before joining HuffPost in 2016 — said in an interview. “And then your response is, ‘Your mom’?”
Mr. Trump and his aides have regularly bad-mouthed the press and many journalists over the years, turning to disparaging terms like nasty, dying, disgusting and fake. They show less restraint in their pushback against Mr. Dáte, accentuating his somewhat lonely professional existence — reporting for a progressive publication in a building increasingly populated by right-wing outlets supportive of the current administration.
HuffPost has a seat in the White House briefing room and participates in a rotation of journalists covering Mr. Trump’s events. Invective from officialdom seems to come with those privileges. After the flare-up over the Budapest question, for example, Ms. Leavitt told Mr. Dáte via text that he was a “far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face.”
As he reported on a story this fall about Stephen Miller, one of Mr. Trump’s top aides, Mr. Dáte received an expletive-laden text from Mr. Cheung chiding his physical stature and his masculinity, according to a text chain Mr. Dáte provided.
“In nine years, have I ever insulted you?” Mr. Dáte responded. Mr. Cheung then wrote that Mr. Dáte was “being a moron.”
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