Donald Trump showed up to the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Friday night, delivered an hour of rambling insults at a room full of journalists he has sued, subpoenaed, and banned from events, and then put on a red hat that said 'Trump 2028.' The Constitution's 22nd Amendment was unavailable for comment. This is where we are.
The Show Went On. God Help Us.
The original dinner in April was cut short when a gunman opened fire, forcing a postponement that nobody in Washington was entirely sure should be un-postponed. But Friday night at the Waldorf Astoria, the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association dinner happened anyway, with tighter security, a smaller venue holding about 700 guests, and one very enthusiastic host who built the building.
"It's great to be back at a place that I know very well, because I built it," Trump told the crowd, according to NPR. He was referring to the Waldorf Astoria, formerly the Trump International Hotel. Classic opener. Man attends dinner honoring the press freedom he has spent a year attacking, inside a hotel he used to own, three months after a mass shooting disrupted the first attempt. The speech had nowhere to go but weird from there.
Trump entered to polite applause. Outgoing WHCA president Weijia Jiang of CBS News thanked him for his support. Then everyone sat through an hour of journalism award presentations, followed by an hour of Trump. The journalism awards, Trump noted with a grimace, were mostly for stories that challenged him and his administration. "Do I have a say in those awards?" he asked. He does not. That is, famously, the point.
An Hour of Insults, Lightly Seasoned with Racism
Trump had promised to tone it down from what he'd originally prepared. "That was going to be a doozy," he said, per NPR, referring to the April speech that never got delivered. So consider Friday night the diet version. The lite beer of public humiliation.
The targets included Jane Fonda, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Rep. Ilhan Omar, California Governor Gavin Newsom, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and, in a move that required spelling out his middle name for emphasis, "Barack Hussein Obama." The Associated Press noted that some of the comments flirted with racism. NPR reports the audience, which started out with friendly laughs, slowly went quiet as the insults piled up. There is a specific kind of silence that settles over a room when a joke stops being a joke and becomes something else. The correspondents' dinner found it.
Trump also took shots at his own speechwriters, criticizing their jokes while delivering them. Which is one way to handle a writing staff. Not a good way, but a way.
The Third Term Bit That Wasn't Entirely a Bit
Here is the part that is going to live rent-free in political reporters' heads for weeks. At the end of the speech, Trump riffed on the possibility of a third term, which the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits. "Just like my presidency, the second time is always better," he said, per NPR. "And the third time will be better yet."
He added: "I'm only kidding." Then, at the very end of the night, he put on a red cap that said "Trump 2028" and announced he was running again. The crowd was left to figure out how much of that was a joke on their own, which is a fine thing to do to a roomful of journalists and an absolutely insane thing to do to a constitutional democracy.
This is the part of the evening that the White House will call a harmless bit and that legal scholars will quietly note is not technically harmless.
The People Who Actually Deserved the Recognition
Before we get completely lost in the Trump extended-universe content, the dinner did something genuinely worth noting. Two additional awards were presented that had nothing to do with the usual journalism prizes.
Victor Gonzales, the Secret Service agent on duty at a security checkpoint during the April shooting, received an award for placing himself directly in the gunman's path and engaging the armed suspect. Per NPR, WHCA president Jiang said Gonzales "stayed in the fight and the attacker was stopped." The staff of the Washington Hilton, where the original dinner was held, received a second award for their professionalism under pressure that night.
These were quiet, serious moments in an evening that was mostly neither. Jiang told the crowd: "We will not be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word." She is correct about that. The final word on Friday, however, belonged to a man in a red hat.
The Subpoena That Got Dropped the Day Before
One more detail that the evening could not quite shake off: Tyler Pager of the New York Times was among the journalists receiving an award Friday night. Pager is also one of the reporters whom Trump's Justice Department subpoenaed over his reporting about the Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet. Those subpoenas were withdrawn in a New York courtroom on Thursday, the day before the dinner, according to NPR.
So to recap the timeline: Trump's DOJ subpoenas a reporter. Reporter wins an award. Subpoena gets quietly dropped the day before Trump has to sit in a room with that reporter. Trump then gives a speech calling the audience "the largest group of Trump Derangement Syndrome people put together at one time."
The president also promised to come back next year. So there is that to look forward to.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what the White House Correspondents' Dinner has always been: an uncomfortable truce between the people who hold power and the people whose job is to scrutinize it, dressed up in tuxedos and bad jokes and an open bar. It has always been a little awkward. It has always involved some tension. But it has not always involved a sitting president putting on a campaign hat for an election the Constitution says he cannot run in, after delivering an hour of increasingly unfunny insults to the reporters he has been legally harassing all year. That part is new.
The 2028 hat gag will be dismissed as a joke by everyone who needs it to be a joke. And maybe it is. But Trump has spent his entire second term testing which norms bend and which ones break, and he has learned that the answer is almost always "more than you'd think." When a president jokes about a third term while wearing merchandise for a third term, the correct response is not to assume he's kidding and move on. The correct response is to treat it exactly as seriously as the text of the 22nd Amendment demands, which is: very.
The real story of Friday night is not the insults or the hat or even the jokes that died in a room full of journalists. It is that the dinner happened at all, three months after a gunman tried to stop it. The Secret Service agent who got shot doing his job got a small trophy in a hotel ballroom. The hotel staff who kept their heads got recognized in front of 700 people. And the press corps, whom this president has sued and subpoenaed and banned and called enemies, showed up anyway and gave out awards for the work. That part, at least, is not nothing.
