It started out so well.
The do-over of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, rescheduled after a gunman allegedly tried to assassinate US President Donald Trump and top administration officials at the previous one, began with mutual rejection of political violence and recognition of the importance of a free press.
“An assassination attempt on our president is an attack on democracy itself,” said Weijia Jiang, the association’s outgoing president. “We will not be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word.”
Trump was seated at a long table on stage, facing the room and nursing a glass of Diet Coke. Before speaking, he had to sit through a presentation of annual awards for political journalism – including multiple gongs for stories that he did not like.
News Corp’s The Wall Street Journal won a major prize for reporting on Trump’s past relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, including the explosive story about a “birthday book” for Epstein in 2003 that included a cryptic letter bearing Trump’s signature.
Trump has refiled a $US10 billion ($14 billion) lawsuit against the paper and Rupert Murdoch over the story. And yet on Friday night, he clapped as the reporting team accepted their awards, and then shook their hands. At times, he threw his hands in the air – “What can you do?” – and grinned.
“This has not been an easy evening, all these awards,” Trump said to laughter as he finally took to the stage. “Do I have a say?”
It had all the hallmarks of a conciliatory evening undertaken with good humour, grace and professionalism. Then the president’s speech began.
The dinner is an unusual beast for both politician and journalist, just like the lower-key Australian equivalent, the Midwinter Ball. Reporters rub shoulders with people they normally cover from a distance, sometimes quite critically. The president is expected to be light and funny with people he vaguely knows, but is also being watched by millions of Americans and people around the world. Some find the whole concept distasteful.
Trump failed on every count. His pre-written jokes mostly bombed, to the point where he had to explain some of them. He started blaming his own speechwriters.
“Who the hell wrote that?” he exclaimed after a failed joke about Democrat Elizabeth Warren and a totem pole.
Then he tried to tell a joke about an ageing senator needing to climb the stairs to have sex with his wife. No one laughed.
“Does anybody get that?” Trump asked. “That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freakin’ stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one and that went down with not exactly great laughter … does anybody understand this stuff?”
Awkward.
There were recycled jokes about former New Jersey governor Chris Christie being a “fat pig”, and a long, laboured bit about California’s Gavin Newsom, or “Newscum”, as Trump brands him. It was material everyone in the room had heard before.
Some were not jokes but crude political attacks. He called Democratic senator Adam Schiff a liar and a “watermelon head”, asking: “How does that big fat ugly head stand on a little pencil neck?”
But the worst moment in the speech came when Trump turned his attention to CNN host Kaitlan Collins, who was in the room, and told her she shouldn’t have received her award for outstanding news coverage under deadline pressure.
“It was fake, there was no question about it,” he said of her work. The award was actually for her coverage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s infamous White House visit last year.
But Trump wasn’t finished. He resurrected a complaint from earlier this year that Collins fails to smile. “She’s a young, attractive woman – she never smiles,” he said. “You have a nice position, you’re at CNN fake news, you should be a happy person – so smile, Kaitlan, just smile.”
He then attempted a joke about how Collins resembled transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney. Legendary CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, sitting beside Collins in the room, looked like he wanted the ground to swallow them up.
Meanwhile, on CNN’s live coverage of the event, their colleagues were appalled. “This attack on our colleague Kaitlan Collins is as absurd as it is false,” said national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny. The network immediately issued a statement in defence of Collins, who is one of the country’s most respected journalists.
Trump’s speech did have its amusing moments. There was genuine laughter early on when he joked that the evening’s beef tenderloin was so fresh because Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr “personally ran over the cow in his car”.
Kennedy has admitted to dumping a dead bear in New York’s Central Park many years ago. Trump observed: “He is fun, but he’s a very different kind of a person.”
And the president hit close to home in one of his parting observations: that the media would miss him when he’s gone. “You’re all going to be broke,” he said. “There’s not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.”
To that effect, he then donned a “Trump 2028” cap and resurrected his routine about attempting to run for an unconstitutional third term.
There was also a brief mention of the war in Iran, and long, rambling bits about the beauty of the forthcoming White House ballroom, and the weather during the UFC fight at the White House.
For Americans watching at home on a Friday night, there was nothing about healthcare or the cost of living, or how their lives might be improved.
Indeed, at times much of the material could have been lifted directly from a Trump rally. And the image of Trump, wearing a Trump 2028 hat, leaving the stage to his preferred theme song, Y.M.C.A., was a bad look for the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The annual dinner is an opportunity to rise above the day-to-day sparring that often marks political reporting – especially with this president.
It is an occasion for levity, grace and recognising the mutual dependency of politician and press. It’s also a time for tipping one’s hat to journalistic independence and the virtue of press freedom.
Mostly, it’s a chance to deliver something out of the ordinary and unexpected. In his familiar insults and reheated messages, Trump delivered more of the same.
There were some moments of hope. The president’s very appearance, after so many years of refusing to attend, was a big step, and he seemed genuinely conciliatory with the reporters who won awards for holding him to account.
It was sad, then, that the evening will instead be remembered for one of the most unfunny, tasteless and ultimately boring speeches you are ever likely to see.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.