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As Bombs Fall in Iran, Trump Bombs in Washington

Held in the spirit of “The show must go on,” the show went on and on – suggesting the dinner is due for a change.

By John F. Harris

There’s a familiar explanation for the rise of Donald Trump that dispenses with ideology or sociology in favor of something more relatable in human terms: Let’s face it, the guy can be very funny.

Or so some people believe. I’ve heard it often, including from folks who voted for him grudgingly or not at all. It’s a brand of humor that is not to everybody’s taste, to put it mildly. But it did seem uniquely well-suited for a nihilistic age of politics, in which old standards and restraints were obsolete. By these lights, Trump’s raucous irreverence, his fluency in mockery and insult, his defiance of liberal pieties, his willingness to say aloud things that many people think but dare not utter — all delivered with gleeful delight in his own showmanship — are an essential engine of his appeal.

So this past weekend was a Washington mystery: How did one of the great performers of the age, the guy who is supposed to be funny, flop so vividly at an occasion — the rescheduled White House Correspondents Association dinner — in which presidents are judged precisely on their ability to be funny?

Trump bombed because it was evident during his hour-plus remarks that he was winging it. Some of his lines were shadows of jokes that would have worked well with crisper delivery. This suggested that some collection of people had worked hard on his material — but Trump was plainly not part of that group. With a rambling, zig-zag tour of his own pet obsessions and grievances, the president seemingly believed that just Trump being Trump was enough to get the job done. The result was mild laughter here and there but one that cumulatively represented one of the most awkward shift-in-your-seat, check-your-phone, avert-your-gaze performances in recent decades of presidents coming to the dinner.

Honestly, who cares?

The annual dinner at best (and at worst) is a frivolous and inconsequential event. Trump’s clumsy patter, however, is actually a decent window into the larger state of his presidency and his movement in its late stages. Let Trump be Trump is the essence of the Republican strategy for the mid-term elections. Trump being Trump — a cascade of threats, actions, pronouncements of illusory ceasefires followed by new conflict — has defined the U.S. strategy in the war with Iran, the most consequential matter on the president’s agenda this year.

Improvisation — winging it — has its limits.

Those limits seem particularly germane to a president at age 80, now in his 12th year of bending his party to his will. He is in month 66 of what with two terms will be 96 months as president. But his arena might be substantially circumscribed just over three months from now if Republicans lose one or both chambers in Congress (possible) and as the attention of the political class turns (inevitable) to the question of Trump’s successor and the 2028 election.

Presidential performances at Washington social events — like the WHCA dinner and a handful of similar occasions — can, when smartly turned, shift narratives and put presidents in a more appealing light.

But the performances typically conform to a certain form. The form rewards self-deprecation, playful jousting with prevailing storylines and the ability to project, if just for the evening, an ironic sensibility. A classic example was John F. Kennedy, while still in the Senate in 1958, skewering (and thereby deflating) his rich-kid reputation. He pretended to read a telegram from his wealthy father: “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary — I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

Trump himself had a good line of this variety when he attended the Gridiron in 2018 in his first term and talked about his willingness to hold a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il: “As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.”

At Friday night’s dinner, there were a couple of lines that followed that classic dynamic of straight-faced set-up and insider punchline. “Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I, for one, wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News.”

For the most part, however, Trump dispensed with anything that required formal construction of a joke — and therefore sticking to a delivery that rewards cadence and timing — in favor of freeform insult. There were fat jokes for Democratic politicians like retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Sen. Adam Schiff was “watermelon head” with a “pencil neck.” And on and on, as a long parade of people he dislikes were called ugly, stupid, unpatriotic, and so forth.

In its own way, the performance and tepid response in the room of journalists and Washington personages may have underlined how Trump and Trumpism are entering the twilight hours. At one time, the speech might well have elicited gasps and groans, but there was none of that. At one time, the scattered nature of his text — bouncing between topics with nothing by way of transition or linear logic — would have been startling. But that too is like a drug that wears off over time.

As it happens, Trump wasn’t the only factor that led the mind to reflect on the closing of an era. The journalists’ speeches cumulatively were as long and nearly as self-referential as Trump’s. There were many references to how the dinner had been rescheduled after the original April date was interrupted and then canceled when a gunman tried to charge the ballroom. Weijia Jang of CBS News, the outgoing president of the WHCA, drew praise for her poised presence that night and decision to reschedule the dinner. But many speakers praised the purported bravery of the correspondents association as if they were the equivalent of Union troops holding back Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Video tributes by still-living giants of an earlier era in broadcast journalism — including Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson and Ann Compton — unintentionally made an uncomfortable point: None of today’s White House correspondents and network anchors have anything like the audience reach those people enjoyed.

Trump said he came to the rescheduled dinner in the spirit of, “The show must go on.” It was an evening that went on and on — a full four hours — and also suggested that the show is due for a change.