White House Correspondents Dinner

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Donald and Melania Trump entered the hall at 8:16 to cheers and applause. “Hail to the Chief” was followed by presentation of the colors and the National Anthem.  We had a brief introduction from Weijia Jiang, this year’s president of the White House Correspondents Association, followed by dinner. Two questions hovered in the background. One, how would President Trump treat the press? And two, would he, as had many presidents in the past at this event, treat the audience to a little self-deprecating humor? “Donald Trump” and  “self-deprecation” are not words you often hear together, but who knows?  The President is also a master communicator who reads his audience well.   We never found out.

Sunday

Cockburn

A White House Correspondents’ Dinner hangover

By now, you have surely got a flavor of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and all the accompanying parties that took place over the weekend. After all, the DC media has nothing to talk about other than itself. The President long ago chose not to attend, and that the intimation was that members of his administration should skip the “MSM” events too. There were fewer celebrities than ever – not least because the White House Correspondents’ Association got rid of the comedian who was set to provide the entertainment. The gargantuan TIME after-party – your correspondent saw the entry tally at over 2,470 when he arrived at 11:30 – smelled like feet due to the Raclette on the rear terrace.

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Dominic Green

It’s time to end the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

You have to give it to Donald Trump. Not for pushing North Korea towards negotiations, or for holding China to account over dumping low-grade steel onto the American market, or even for healing the diplomatic breach between France and the United States—but for missing the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night. People accuse Trump of being capricious and having a poor sense of judgement, but he’s consistent when it comes to the Correspondents' Dinner. The crassness of Michelle Wolf’s jokes makes you wonder whether it’s the press, not the president, whose judgement is askew. Trump dodged the dinner last year too, and is presumably already filling his calendar for the next two years. This year, Trump addressed a rally in Michigan.

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Freddy Gray

Michelle Wolf’s disgusting White House Correspondents’ dinner routine is another PR win for Team Trump

A lot of Washingtonians think that, were it not for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, you wouldn’t have a Trump presidency. It sounds hyperbolic, and the theory has been disputed, but Trump watchers still believe that President Obama’s roasting of Donald Trump at the correspondents' dinner in 2011 spurred Trump to seek the Republican nomination. Trump’s epic pride was so wounded by Obama’s barbs that it made him determined to take revenge. And he did. This year the Correspondents’ dinner has given Trump’s power another boost. I’m sure Michelle Wolf wouldn’t have wanted to help the 45th President: she probably just wanted to make herself more famous.

Friday

Cockburn

The rise of the sex-positive pro-porn politico

Rising from the ashes of anti-porn laws racked up by hardline Republicans in Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma comes a team-switcher who flipped from flying his freak flag to wiping his history of porn likes on Twitter. Dan Osborn, who is married with children per his website, is the Democrat-turned-Independent running for a US Senate seat in Nebraska this November. He’s leaning heavily on his time helming a local union, but it’s his extracurricular activities that raised Cockburn’s eyebrows — mostly the slew of hardcore gay and straight porn he’s liked on Twitter. The faint-hearted should skip to the next item now...

genghis donald trump boomer republicanism establishment
Roger Kimball

Why the Establishment hates Donald Trump

Like many commentators who have struggled to understand the reasons for the inveterate hatred of Donald Trump among the swank people who actually run the country, I have generally come up with two answers. The first is aesthetic.  Trump does not look like, act like or talk like a typical politician. He has a funny hairdo, seems to have a fake tan and his taste in clothes and food are infra dignitatem. He consorts with people who organize fights and other riff-raff. Ronald Reagan was a movie actor, something for which he was mercilessly pilloried by the New Yorker-New York Times set in the run-up to and throughout his presidency. But Donald Trump hosted a demotic reality TV show, which was even worse.

Wednesday

Grace Curley

Trump would never quash the free press

As if the media’s coverage of the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend wasn’t painful enough, now we have to listen to TV personalities agonize over nerd prom's hypothetical demise. The latest in-sync meltdowns stemmed from a joke made by the dinner’s headliner comedian Colin Jost. "Colin Jost had a pretty apt joke tonight when he said this may be the final White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Vanity Fair at the NBCUniversal afterparty. “I think people have to think seriously about what’s going on right now.” Nothing says "afterparty fun" like grave assertions about the future of the American media.

donald trump press

Sunday

Ben Smith

Confessions of a media chronicler

We held the party for my new book, Traffic, at Umberto’s Clam House, by the office of our new news organization, Semafor. Umberto’s is best known as the site of a notorious 1972 mob hit — “they blew him down in a clam bar in New York,” Bob Dylan sang of Joey Gallo. I’d worried the space was too small, but it was perfectly packed and noisy, with blue oil paintings of crabs on the walls. I broke off a conversation with CNN president Chris Licht to take a call from a recently fired anchor from another network. When I came back our executive editor Gina Chua began the short program by spilling who I’d been talking to.

ben smith

Friday

Cockburn

Fox you, Media Matters!

You’d think Fox Corporation would be sick of lawsuits by now — but there’s life in the old dog yet. The company has sent a letter to Media Matters for America, after the left-wing watchdog spent the week drip-feeding what they’ve brazenly titled “FOXLEAKS.” So far the “scoops” consist of... Tucker Carlson cracking a few jokes between segments.Fox lawyers write that the footage was “unlawfully obtained.” This has ruined Cockburn’s chances of winning $5, because he was sure Fox were the leakers. Cockburn’s second guess was Abby Grossberg, the former Tucker booker suing her old bosses for maintaining a toxic work environment — but a source familiar with the show says they don’t think it’s Abby.

media matters