In all my years covering jokes, people who make jokes, and people who respond to jokes in the worst possible ways, I’ve never quite seen anything like last night’s performance by President Trump at the WHCA Dinner.
I had to write my observations out quickly to get it to press (editors Clarissa Pharr and Jarvis DeBerry of MS NOW helped me to majorly sort out my thoughts) and you can read my review here.
But in a nutshell: Donald Trump bombed so hard, Denmark called and said he could have Greenland.
No? Ok, I’ll stop.
On the morning after, I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t even know what I was watching on C-Span. Was it comedy, a stump speech, a 63-minute hallucination, an infomercial about dementia? Back in April, before the cancelled WHCA Dinner, the Trump camp promised that his speech would be comedy gold. He was even working with joke writers. He was going to “let it rip.”
Last night, we often just heard the recycled punchlines but not the set-ups to the jokes (or vice versa). That was really confusing. But what was clear was the degree to which Trump hates the people he was trying to roast (e.g., AOC, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen, Rosie O’Donnell, Adam Schiff, JB Pritzker, Jerry Nadler, Don Lemon, Jack Smith, Jake Tapper, James Talarico, Chuck Schumer, the “Dumbocrats,” etc). I also suggest you listen to the joke he was trying to make about CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. I’m not going to reconstruct it here.
This whole mess is on the WHCA. They caved to MAGA and cancelled the tradition of featuring a comedian at their annual Dinner. They thus yielded the stage to the most powerful person in the world and let him—and him alone-- make the “jokes.” Festooned in a “Trump 2028” hat, he seized the opportunity to spread falsehoods, vilify his opponents, concuss the First Amendment, and remind us how hard it is to do comedy well.
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Thanking Catherine Hughes and Carmela Cadja for their research and editorial assistance
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