President Trump appeared at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, which took place in Washington, D.C. on Friday with a new location and a drastically reduced list of attendees, following the cancellation of the event in April after a gunman fired shots as the event was underway.
Moved to the Waldorf Astoria in the nation’s capital instead of the Washington Hilton and reduced from 2,600 guests down to around 680, it was less a star-studded event that each year sees celebrity guests brush elbows with reporters and editors as they sit with the politicians they cover — the optics of which are criticized each year by journalists and critics alike.
For the make-up dinner, the WHCA is also bringing back the Secret Service member who survived the April shooting, when 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly intended to target multiple Trump administration officials, was arrested near the screening area outside the banquet hall after running past the security checkpoint. Plus, the dinner honored the Washington Hilton staff who stayed on the scene and continued tending to rattled guests.
Elements of the first dinner remained. The awards were handed out; mentalist Oz Pearlman, who got just one private trick for the White House press secretary at the first dinner before gunshots caused chaos, returned to deliver some levity; and ahead of the event, a group of hundreds of former journalists and press freedom groups sent a letter to the WHCA. Now, they were urging the association to capitalize on Trump’s attendance by calling him out for his administration’s attacks on First Amendment rights, which include recently subpoenaing New York Times reporters over their coverage and threatening to revoke licenses of broadcasters.
The president took to the stage around 9:30 p.m. ET and brought up the attempted attack early in his much-anticipated speech, which has been speculated upon heavily in April and again ahead of the July event. Traditionally, the dinner’s speeches are a roast of the attendees and the president himself.
“The attempted mass murder at the Washington Hilton-that’s what it could have been-was an assault on our democracy itself,” Trump said. “A very serious situation. Many of you were there with me, and some showed extreme bravery, like Pete Hegseth, Steve Miller, Tom Holman. Really, they were standing on tables. And most of you were under the table,” he said to Friday night’s attendees, which got some laughs.
Following some begrudging admiration of the press and the constitutional freedom of speech, the notion of a third Trump term, the White House ballroom project, and Robert Kennedy Jr. mowing down the cow served at dinner with his car were some of Trump’s early jokes. They garnered a new laugh, but his first zinger to fall completely flat came soon and involved a rapper and MAGA convert whom he recently had at a White House event.
“After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” he said, referring to the dance. “Do you believe it? Get down. She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
Trump’s speech began to meander as he at first reminisced about the Waldorf Astoria in the 1980s and moved to a number of topics and name-dropped celebrities not in the room and with whom he has personal gripes, some going back for decades. Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen all got a mention, with the latter’s looks as he ages compared to the president’s own. Trump joked that his live show, where he was railing about the administration’s policies, was now called “Bored in the U.S.A.”
Attendees were caught on camera in footage streamed live by the Associated Press looking bored and irritated as Trump’s speech went past the 20-minute mark, and it was clear this was not going to be the biting speech some anticipated Trump’s typical airing, but another airing of grievance from Trump peppered with a few jokes that landed with a thud.
Even the president was critical of some of the jokes when they received no laughs. At one point, he referred to the “governor of Chicago,” presumably billionaire Gov. of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, while discussing a staged fight among politicians.
“I would say I could mention the governor of Chicago, but I’m going to mention instead Jerry Nadler, and they’re fighting for a big piece of cheesecake, big fat piece of cheesecake,” he said to zero audible laughs. “Who the hell wrote that line?”
During the airing of grievances portion of his speech on a night celebrating journalists, Trump, as expected, tore into reporters for perceived unfair treatment, and specifically mentioned CNN anchors Kaitlan Collins (an award recipient honored earlier in the night) and Jake Tapper (a multiple winner of the multiple recipient of the White House Correspondents’ Association Merriman Smith Award).
Following mentions of late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, whom he called talentless, Trump also admitted that he truly hates some people.
“They thought about going with a professional clown for entertainment, but Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff was not available,” Trump joked. “You know he’s known — I hate some people. You know, I shouldn’t say the surprise. I’m not supposed to hate him. I’m supposed to love everybody, but he’s a terrible person. He’s a liar, and I called him watermelon head because he has the largest head I’ve ever seen with the smallest neck, pencil neck. How does that big fat ugly head stand on a on a little pencil, pencil, pencil neck?”
After about an hour of a speech that turned nasty fast and featured few funny lines, Trump ended the speech on an up note and even praised the journalists in the room and their profession.
“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world, and we’re going to keep it going,” he said. “And I just want to say, this is a room I have tremendous respect for the people in this room. Sometimes I don’t feel you treat me fair. Maybe you do. I don’t know. I don’t feel that. But sometimes you treat me very fairly, and I have a lot of respect for your profession. Your profession is amazing. And I just want to thank you for having me. And it’s been fun.”
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