View from the Left: The White House press corps's 'slippery slope to collaboration' with Trump

The White House press corps is taking fire from all sides but, most pointedly, from the incoming administration and popular vote loser Donald Trump. I do not envy their predicament. Unfortunately, it looks as though they're preparing to simply enable their abuser in a futile effort that will do little to shed light on what Trump is actually doing. Witness this response from the vice president of the White House Correspondents Association, Margaret Talev, after Bloomberg's John Heilemann asked her how she felt about Trump's raucous press conference last week.

MARGARET TALEV: Well for many of the reporters watching that, startled, because it's not the way you normally think of a president-elect or a president dealing with his press corps, particularly at a time that he's promising to unify the country and get off to a good start and all of that. But look I think as a press corps, we all need to have a tough skin and to differentiate between unusual or guerrilla tactics that we need to learn how to live with and things that cross a red line. And this is something that we're going to need to be mindful of and adjust to, but I think it's a matter of keeping the eyes on the prize, which is the ability to ask questions of incoming President Trump and his top staff on the record and get answers. And to have access to these buildings, into the briefing rooms, the venues, for these questions take place.

I know Talev from when I worked as a White House correspondent in the early Obama years—she's both a good reporter and a good person. I also know the press corps takes seriously its responsibilities and is trying to make lemonade out of lemons. And yet her answer reminds me of two things: first, how much it resembles that of someone in an abusive relationship; and second, journalist Masha Gessen urging us all to "shift from realist to moral reasoning" in the age of Trump.