Trump escalates feud with media ahead of White House Correspondents' Dinner
The president has told administration officials to boycott the annual event. Trump is skipping the dinner for the third consecutive year and holding a rally instead.
A story in Politico Magazine headlined “How Trump Took the Shine of Washington’s Glitziest Night” said President Trump’s refusal to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner has turned it “back to the boring awards ceremony journalists claimed to prefer.”
I say congratulations to President Trump for exposing and making irrelevant one of Washington’s most pompous nights. The affair – being held Saturday night – is populated by mostly liberal media elites and celebrities anxious to insult him, Republicans, conservatives and Christians.
As the dinner falls into well-deserved obscurity, it’s worth remembering that it was this very dinner – and its often vile insults – that gave birth to the presidency of Donald Trump.
WHITE HOUSE STAFF TO SKIP CORRESPONDENTS' DINNER AFTER LAST YEAR'S CONTROVERSY
Back in 2011, third-rate comedian Seth Meyers was the host. That year – with then-President Obama playing the part of his smirking, laughing accomplice – Myers repeatedly savaged businessman Donald Trump with joke after joke. Trump sat nearby in the audience.
While literally looking down on Trump from the podium, Obama and Myers laughed in his face as they launched multiple insults meant to demean him in public. They made most bullies look tame by comparison.
Trump sat through jokes about stupidity, bikini babes, bad hair and race. A video narrated by Obama equated a future Trump White House to something worse than TV’s “Beverly Hillbillies.”
The liberal news site Vox called the routine “vicious” and The Daily Beast called it “merciless.”
After the event Trump called the attacks “nasty and out of order.”
It was reported that during the fusillade of defaming remarks, Trump sat there “stone-faced” and “fuming.”
Who wouldn’t?
Since that dinner, a number of people – including liberals – have wondered if that was the exact moment Donald Trump decided he was going to run for president.
Unfunny Seth Meyers seems to think so. Meyers said later during an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show: “It’s not the outcome I wanted, but that’s history. I got a man elected president.”
Indeed, he apparently did.
But it’s one thing for a lower-tier comedian to go after a private citizen. It’s quite another to have a sitting president participate in such a craven rhetorical assault.
President Obama is known for making a number of mistakes while in the Oval Office and never liking to admit any of them.
In the eyes of Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former “Apprentice” contestant and later an official in the Trump White House, this was one of Obama’s larger mistakes.
Said Omarosa of the insults aimed at Trump: “It just kept going and going, and he just kept hammering him. And I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish.’”
How right she was.
Eight years after going after Trump it is clear the ultimate joke is on Obama, as now his successor in the White House continues to cancel or roll back one disastrous Obama policy after another.
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This is why Trump is making America great again.
And for that, we can thank the now boring and irrelevant White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and its mostly liberal and elitist attendees.
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