The book on how to cover the White House is being rewritten every day, as President Donald Trump by turns courts, spurns, vilifies and circumvents members of the news media in pursuit of his changing agenda. Journalists from the front lines will discuss the unprecedented challenges of reporting on the presidency as well as the latest news from Washington to open this year’s Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival, a weekend devoted to writers, issues and ideas.

Nationally syndicated columnist and political commentator E. J. Dionne Jr. will lead the August 4 opening panel that includes two notable White House correspondents: Ashley Parker of The Washington Post and Glenn Thrush of The New York Times.

Titled Tweets, Leaks and Turmoil: Covering the Trump White House, the event is presented by the Vineyard Gazette and begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Chilmark Community Center.

The book festival continues over the next two days with a full and varied lineup of celebrated authors as well as rising stars in fiction and nonfiction. Headliners include novelists Ann Patchett, Richard Russo and Amor Towles, who will come together for a public conversation at noon on Saturday in Edgartown. On Sunday in Chilmark, Caroline Kennedy, former ambassador to Japan, will introduce Min Jin Lee, whose new novel Pachinko follows a Korean family forced to immigrate to Japan.

Featured nonfiction writers range from Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University who has written extensively on gender and language, to NPR host Scott Simon, whose new book describes his lifelong love affair with the Chicago Cubs. Other authors include three leading professors of African-American history: Carol Anderson, Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Tera Hunter.

A complete list of authors and speaking schedules are at mvbookfestival.com.

For the opening event, lively discussion is expected about how the rules of White House reporting have been upended by the current administration. Mr. Dionne, a longtime political reporter and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post and is a regular commentator for MSNBC, NPR and PBS. He is the author of several books, most recently Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism — From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond, published in 2016 by Simon & Schuster.

Ms. Parker and Mr. Thrush are in the vanguard of a new generation of reporters covering the uncharted terrain of national politics in the Trump era. Both are credited with regularly breaking news from the White House, and their bylines often appear multiple times a day. Ms. Parker was a Washington-based reporter for The New York Times for six years before joining The Washington Post in 2017. She is also a senior political analyst for MSNBC. Mr. Thrush was chief political correspondent for Politico for several years before joining The New York Times in January. He and fellow Times reporter Maggie Haberman frequently collaborate on coverage of the president.

On Saturday, Aug. 5, the festival is at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown, where seven successive panels of authors address topical issues, from cooking and culture to women’s rights. It moves up-Island on Sunday to the grounds of the Chilmark Community Center, where readers can choose among four concurrent author talks under separate tents and in the hall throughout the day.

The book festival, held every other year, was founded in 2005 by Chilmark summer resident Suellen Lazarus. The Friday evening opening event was added in 2015, with a conversation between author Ta-Nehisi Coates and NPR host Michele Norris.

“We are thrilled with the author line up this year,” Ms. Lazarus said of the festival. “It includes some stellar fiction and important work by leading voices on vital issues such as race, reproductive rights, politics, gender and the environment. It is also fun and interesting with a mix of novels, narrative journalism, memoirs and cookbooks. And in addition to the writers, we have an all-star cast to introduce and interview authors and moderate panels.”

The opening discussion on August 4 is sold out.  The rest of the book festival is free and open to all.