Trump’s correspondents’ dinner schtick was a bomb
Twenty-two years ago, as the Iraq War raged and George W. Bush came under fire for wrongly claiming Iraqi weapons threatened the U.S. and the world, he appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He aired images of himself looking under Oval Office furniture and out the windows, while asking “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.”
Seven years later, as rightists claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the president told the assembled reporters he was going to clarify it all. “Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video,” Obama deadpanned, before showing the opening scene of Disney’s “The Lion King,” when the royal cub Simba is presented on the savanna.
This year was different.
Donald J. Trump made fat jokes about his former acolyte Chris Christie and about Rep. Jerry Nadler and potential presidential contender J.B. Pritzker (”Don’t call him a fat pig, okay? I’m sticking up for him.”) He repeatedly insulted Joe Biden (“So, just remember, before I came along, if you wanted to see someone lose consciousness on the South Lawn of the White House, all you had to do is ask Joe Biden a question.”) He mocked Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar, saying she “and her brother are thinking about moving together. Very much in love.”
Trump also took potshots at the July 24 affair at Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He called CNN’s Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper.” After the cable channel’s Kaitlan Collins got an award for excellence in presidential news coverage, Trump slammed her “fake” stories and faulted her for not smiling.
If Trump’s appearance had been a Broadway show, the night would have been its sole performance – maybe even shuttered halfway through. The notices, as the old term goes, were not good.
“Moments of presidential self-deprecation were few and far between,” The New York Times reported. “There was little laughter in the room as the president’s speech took on a harder edge. Not many people chuckled when he compared the ‘really beat-up faces’ of UFC fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen.”
Jem Bartholomew of the Columbia Journalism Review was far less measured:
Calling it a “farcical spectacle,” he wrote: “In our current moment, the dinner feels especially incoherent and misguided—seven hundred journalists, dressed in their finest clothes, agreeing to break bread and drink wine with administration figures who are aggressively and systematically cracking down on journalism and free speech.”
And, likewise, former White House Correspondent Jim Acosta pulled no punches:
“Trump delivered an unhinged, hateful speech that was written for the sole purpose of celebrating his undemocratic assault on news outlets in America and settling scores with his political enemies,” Acosta wrote. “He called people fat. He told racist and anti-gay jokes. He delighted in his oligarch friends taking over the networks. It was thoroughly disgraceful.”
Similarly, longtime press critic Margaret Sullivan skewered the president. Trump’s “hate-filled rant,” she wrote, “… was aimed at journalists, at his political enemies and at anybody else who has failed to suck up to him at every moment or to support his lawless regime.”
But, as the jokes fell flat, Trump also managed to be something he often derides. CNN’s Brian Stelter suggested that “more than anything, the speech was just … boring.”
Many have long criticized the annual correspondents’ dinner for the seeming hypocrisy of the press schmoozing with the officials they are supposed to cover, usually adversarially. How can tuxedoed and begowned journalists grin and toast people during one glittery night when for the rest of the year they hold those same people to account for professional or policy slipups? It all just has seemed smarmy, insincere and too insidey, all a sort of Inside the Beltway self-promoting boastfulness.
Defenders of the affair say it’s really a celebration of the First Amendment and some note that rubbing shoulders with officials can help journalists build sources. Sharing a drink can lubricate relationships, leading to better coverage – in theory.
But this year marks a new low. While many White Houses have been hostile to the press (think Nixon), Trump is not only as humorless as his dinner speech demonstrated, but vicious.
Just this month, the administration issued subpoenas seeking phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times journalists who wrote articles revealing security concerns about Air Force One. After a federal judge in Manhattan scolded the Justice Department for its handling of the matter, the government withdrew the subpoenas. At the dinner, one Times reporter who was a subject of the subpoenas, Tyler Pager, accepted an award.
At another point, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.” Blitzer then noted that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against The Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”
The dinner reflected how the Washington press – and the media generally – face a seemingly impossible job in covering this administration. As the media report on its many outrages in a fair and balanced way, they risk alienating both readers and viewers who are Trumpers and those who loathe the man. And, as they work to maintain access to officials, they risk being accused of being too chummy.
Moreover, critics often deride “sane-washing” by media outlets that struggle to find reasonable through-lines and news in Trump’s usually rambling speeches. They “render [Trump’s] most bizarre and incoherent statements into cogent English, shearing off the crazy in a misleading manner,” as a writer for The Atlantic put it in 2024.
Such efforts are all part of a process of normalizing a White House that couldn’t be further from normal, say critics. Many would rather the Washington press corps dump their annual fete, at least while Trump is in office.
“It is the very essence of normalizing an extremely abnormal and dangerous president,” wrote Sullivan, adding that the press should have risen in unison and walked out on Trump’s speech. “It’s so far past the time when this normalization should have ended that it seems almost absurd to make the argument once again.”
While such arguments carry a lot of weight, reporters need to keep in mind a few realities. First, 77.3 million Americans voted for Trump in 2024 and, while they shouldn’t get cheerleading coverage for that, the media can’t afford to simply turn them all off by showing disrespect, at least for the office. Second, if journalists behave like the enemies Trump has repeatedly called them, they will just make his case for him.
Report critically, report thoroughly and report fairly. Some will buy it. Others won’t. But the facts on everything from Trump’s grifting to his mismanagement of the war in Iran and mishandling of the economy will be out there.
To be clear, the president’s performance at the dinner was despicable and typical. But, in a way, we should be glad it happened. It’ll go down in the history books in all its ugliness, humorlessness and egomania, representative of so much of this presidency. And, more immediately, it helps sets the stage for the midterm election less than 100 days hence, when – perhaps – some of those 77 million will have second thoughts.