Dem
47
GOP
53
The White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) had to postpone its dinner for everyone except that one salad-eating guy, due to the sorta threat posed by an armed assailant. This weekend, with about 3 months having passed, they finally held the re-scheduled event, with Donald Trump in attendance.
This is the first WHCA dinner that Trump has attended as president. Part of the deal is that the sitting president gets ribbed a bit, and he hates to be ribbed. Another part of the deal is that the sitting president gives a funny speech, and Trump is not really capable of being funny. This year, he decided to give it the old college try. And he lived up to that, since for him, college was letting someone else do his writing for him, and then collecting a well-below-average grade.
That's right, the reviews were savage. To the extent that Trump had jokes on tap, they landed with a thud. A lof of them were fat jokes which, coming from him, brings to mind the old line about people in glass houses. Mostly, his speech was re-airing of the same old grievances, along with a bunch of insults and nasty names directed at the crowd. The President got little in the way of a positive response, and many attendees eventually tuned him out, and were milling around in the hall, or looking at their cell phones. Trump himself criticized the speech while he was giving it, blaming the weak material on "whoever" wrote it, and asking the crowd "Does anyone understand this stuff?"
However, we did not write this item so that we might criticize Trump. Everyone knows that he can't deliver a joke. And everyone knows that, since P.J. O'Rourke died, there are (apparently) no conservatives capable of writing anything funny.
We actually wrote this to criticize the people running the WHCA. Keep in mind that the whole point of the WHCA Dinner is to celebrate the First Amendment. But Donald Trump does not care about the First Amendment. He hates the First Amendment. His administration is on a perpetual crusade to curtail First Amendment rights (see Carr, Brendan). Trump is so disdainful of freedom of the press that he badmouthed a bunch of reporters (most obviously Kaitlin Collins) right to their faces at a dinner where he was THEIR guest. He is so disdainful of freedom of speech that the WHCA had to cashier the usual comedian, and instead hire a mentalist as the headliner (and the mentalist, Oz Pearlman, got great reviews, unlike Trump).
Inasmuch as the relationship between the press and the president is at least somewhat adversarial, it's at least a little odd that any president gets invited to this thing. That blurs some lines that probably shouldn't be blurred. But at least every other president was a fan of the First Amendment, and so their attendance was appropriate on that level. Trump isn't, and so his attendance wasn't. We're well over 10 years into his political career; when are the media going to fully accept that you just can't treat him the same as other presidents? (Z)