President Donald Trump stood behind the podium at the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association dinner Friday night and delivered a humorous speech. Classic Trump. Everything you would expect. Naturally, he spent much of his hour-long speech making fun of everybody else in the room, and the correspondents apparently couldn’t handle it and went straight to their keyboards to cry to their mommies about how mean he was.
The original dinner was supposed to happen three months earlier, until another would-be assassin opened fire at the Washington Hilton before Trump ever got to speak that night. "As I said three months ago, the show must go on," Trump told the crowd.
He wasn't shy about revisiting the shooting, either, calling it an "assault on our democracy itself," and crediting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller with showing "extreme bravery" during the attack. Trump admitted the speech he'd originally planned for that night in April would have gone very differently. "Oh, that was gonna be a doozy. I was so liked," he said, explaining that the shooting changed his tone.
It didn't change it for long. Trump told the crowd, "This place is the really the largest group of Trump Derangement Syndrome people ever put together at one time, I suspect." He also needled reporters over the dinner's original cancellation. "Some of you are lucky that our last dinner was cut short, because I had brought with me what would possibly have been. I'm telling you, I had something I was going to go after you," he joked.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, took the brunt of the roast. Trump called him a "piece of work," and riffing on the beef tenderloin served that night, quipped that Kennedy "personally ran over the cow with his car." He added that Kennedy "also suggested an appetizer featuring his favorite cut of male raccoon roadkill."
Trump joked about a third term, too. "Just like my presidency, the second time is always better — and a third time will be better yet," he said, before clarifying he was "only kidding about running for a third term." He said he might show up again next year, having skipped the dinner every year of his presidency except this one. Near the end, he put on a Trump 2028 hat and cracked that the night had gone "far worse than he actually thought." He closed by thanking the press and calling this stretch of his presidency the "golden age of America."
Naturally, the same media that laughed along all night came out swinging the next morning. The Associated Press called the speech "a rambling, hour-long speech that praised some journalists, took potshots at others, made jokes about public figures’ weight and intellect, and quipped about a third presidential term.”
Trump’s sometimes off-color speech, which lasted just over an hour, was full of vague potshots directed at individuals he doesn’t like — from Jane Fonda to Bruce Springsteen to “Barack Hussein Obama.” The audience, reacting at first with some friendly laughs, slowly quieted to scattered titters as the insults piled up.
What horror! Let’s not forget that Biden would attack Trump during his own WHCD dinner speeches, and you didn’t see the media cry about it.
ABC News tallied up his targets, from former President Joe Biden to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), complaining he used "offensive nicknames." The New York Times called it "meandering" and "full of ad hominem attacks."
The meandering speech he gave for the next hour inside the Waldorf Astoria, the former site of the Trump International Hotel, was full of ad hominem attacks against his political enemies, scripted jokes that fell flat and familiar refrains about the war against Iran and the construction of the White House ballroom.
As the hour stretched on, his speech turned harshly political and quite vicious. He mocked the appearances and careers of individual reporters, some of whom were in the room, but much of the speech had little to do with the press. He widened the aperture to target his longtime political enemies, politicians and celebrities who had nothing to do with the dinner.
These are the same outlets that build entire broadcasts around mocking Trump's appearance, his intelligence, and everything else about him, night after night, without a hint of self-awareness. Let one Republican president crack jokes at their expense for an hour, though, and suddenly it's a national tragedy.
It sure seems like the media can dish it out, but it can't take it.
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