Did Naomi Biden Undermine Democracy With a Closed-to-Press Wedding? (No)

Naomi Biden, fancy-looking woman and granddaughter to Joe and Jill, had a quaint backyard wedding at her grandparents’ home this past weekend. Yes, on the South Lawn of the White House.

The fete looked, by all accounts, like a lovely and uneventful upper-crust Catholic wedding: high-neck lace gown; a classic three-piece suit; probably loads of guilt. You know, according to Washington Post political correspondent Ashley Parker, all the underpinnings of a crumbling state under a lying dictator who refused to allow in any press besides Vogue magazine.

The journalist is getting ratio’d pretty hard on Twitter Tuesday for her egregious “both sides” comparison of the Biden administration’s misrepresentation (if it even was that?) of wedding press access to the Trump administration’s 30,000+ actually consequential lies.

Backing up a bit: Apparently, press Secretary Karine Jeanne-Pierre had said before the wedding that it would be a private and a family event, so when Vogue published exclusive pics of the nuptials, the regular White House press corps scratched their heads. But it looks like there is a pretty simple explanation: The bride and Grandma Dr. Jill did a Vogue shoot a few days prior to the wedding. The day-of photos published by the mag were by Adam Schultz, the official White House photographer, and wedding photographer Corbin Gurkin (looks like she also recently snapped Beanie Feldstein’s wedding and Brooklyn Beckham’s weddings, too). It seems like Naomi, who is not a public figure, wanted a chic fashion magazine to cover her wedding rather than the Washington Post. Bridezilla alert!

Amid the backlash to her tweet, Parker made the puzzling decision to double down on it with more both sides-isms instead of just fucking deleting it and apologizing.

Waiving off reporting about a soon-to-be-announced SCOTUS pick isn’t remotely comparable to the many insane and harmful lies Trump touted while in office. Off the top of the my head I’m recalling him claiming the election was stolen, altering an official hurricane map with a sharpie to make his personal prediction about its path look correct, consistently pushing birther-ism theories of non-white politicians, insisting that Covid was no big deal and basically disappearing roughly a month into the global pandemic, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

I’m definitely not saying the Biden administration is blameless and never lies. They do. But not being invited to cover the president’s granddaughter’s wedding isn’t the entry point into that conversation. It also feels fully irresponsible to compare Trump’s rabid lies—especially in this particular moment in American politics—to the newlywed’s decision to close off their private wedding to the press. But, hey, we all get fancy wedding FOMO, right?