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Even by the standards to which we’ve all, by now, become accustomed, President Donald Trump’s performance at Friday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was bizarre. And the fact of it — from the style of his
halting delivery to the substance of his vindictive message to a journalists’ group who’d handed him a mic — made clear that he’s now in something of a spiral. A public figure who, more than any politician or celebrity in our history, has placed the desire for approval at the center of his brand is being confronted by his dwindling popularity. (His approval rating was one of the topics Trump touched upon in a speech that felt less like what he calls “the weave” than like a ramble.) He doesn’t like that his style is falling out of favor, and he’s going to make sure, for the next two-plus years or perhaps even longer, that we know he doesn’t.
Trump’s speech Friday night served as a re-do of the planned address he was meant to give at the original 2026 WHCD in April, which was marred by a gunman firing shots inside the Washington Hilton. He had promised, then, to excoriate the press; on a rescheduled and more somber evening months later, he seemed unsure, at first, how to act. “Let’s have a little bit of fun,” he said. “What do we do here? Is this supposed to be fun, am I supposed to be serious, am I supposed to be a comedian?” But old reflexes kicked in: Just before this, Trump had complained about the evening’s awards, which had gone to various journalists whose work (naturally, given their profession covering the current administration) had been adversarial to his interests. “This has not been an easy evening, all those awards,” he said. “Do I have a say?” Later, he’d go on to criticize journalists including CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey by name.
It’s an article of faith among the online #Resistance that Trump’s never having won an Emmy for “The Apprentice” is a crucial part of his origin story; just because an insight has been dulled by repetition, though, doesn’t make it untrue. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an evening of entertainment programming and an awards ceremony. The latter thing seems to activate something primal within Trump; the former presents for him an opportunity to redefine reality along his own terms, and to force an increasingly bored and quiet audience along for the ride. (Indeed, during his speech, Trump recollected the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner, at which then-President Barack Obama brutally roasted him, as a fun evening he enjoyed, especially because it felt good to be at the center of attention. That is not how the event is widely remembered!)
There was an air of flop sweat to the evening: Like any inept emcee, Trump began blaming unnamed joke writers for basic material — light, sub-Friars Club material lovingly roasting his allies Nicki Minaj and Bari Weiss — falling flat, but his own delivery seemed oddly nervous. In the past, Trump has dominated journalists. Indeed, he’d told the world that’s what he planned to do at April’s first version of this event. Instead, though, Trump seemed affronted and almost frightened of the crowd before him when discussing his own popularity, and diminished as he ran through tired material: The Oscars’ decline in ratings over time, for instance, or his antipathy to Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen and Jane Fonda.
Once, Trump’s raging against the Oscars had a certain charge to it. That’s not because his claims that the show’s ratings are down because of how liberal celebrities are (there’s a lot more to it than that), but because, as a seeming vanguard of seismic cultural change, Trump had the power to subsume basically any entity. Now, though, it’s just sadly predictable. This man has been the defining element of American politics for ten years. We know that he cares a lot about awards! We don’t need to be told again!
That, more than sorrow over the American President going after journalists or mild bemusement that he couldn’t land a Borscht belt joke about an aging Senator unable to consummate his marriage any longer, feels like the takeaway from a vexed, pointless hour of speech. The strange and at-times unknowable mind that even recently gave us turns of phrase like “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” is now hung up on a public that, faced with inflation and an unpopular war in Iran, isn’t laughing anymore. And that mind’s response is to return to safe and comfortable territory, re-fighting old battles with Rosie O’Donnell and with various awards-giving bodies. The show has lost even what lurid appeal it might have held for Trump’s morbidly curious critics. And yet it will go on, and on. Trump vowed, jokingly-but-not, to run for re-election (which the Constitution bars) in 2028. And yet listening to his deflated delivery, one could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. Perhaps he was thinking about who’d won the awards earlier that night.
