President Donald Trump does not appear to be the entertainer he once was, reports CNN’s Brian Stelter.
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The president’s insult-laden speech drew mostly stunned silence from the audience as he attacked a bunch of journalists at the pared-down recap of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday.
“Trump bombed at the … Dinner Friday night. He knew he was bombing, too, and he even tried to meta-joke his way out of it,” reports Stelter. “But no. Even the president’s jokes about his bad jokes fell flat, and he was widely ridiculed for the comedy routine afterward.”
In a “rambling hour-long speech,” Stelter said Trump insulted journalists by name, “repurposed old nicknames for political opponents, made a strange number of fat jokes that weren’t funny at all, and sounded mad at his unnamed writers for giving him weak material to work with.”
“Does anyone understand this stuff?” he said at one point during the razzball speech. The answer, said Stelter, was “generally no. But more than anything, the speech was just … boring.”
“Trump’s low energy led more than one TV executive to muse that the president had stumbled upon a new technique against the media: Tank the ratings with a snoozefest,” added Stelter. “Some attendees said they were surprised that Trump didn’t bring more original material, given how highly anticipated the dinner was, in part because his attendance ended his years-long boycott of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual fundraiser.
Many journalists refused to attend, and the dinner was a small-scale redo of the April 26 black-tie affair that got called off after a gunman tried to rush into the ballroom of the Washington Hilton hotel, so Trump joked about bullet proof vests and how attendees hid under their tables while his staff bravely stood on tables and directed crowds.
He gave shoutouts to media executives he considers propaganda allies, namely Larry and David Ellison, who took control of Paramount last year, killed off the high-rating show of late-night comic gadfly Stephen Colbert, destroyed legacy news show 60 Minutes and turned CBS News into a ratings flop.
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Ellison is now trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and the parent company of CNN.
“Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled,” Trump said, referring to changes implemented by Ellison’s handpicked editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss. “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. She’s a wonderful woman.”
“The more resentful and recycled Trump’s speech got, the more attendees seemed to tune it out,” said Stelter.
One of the most intriguing parts of the evening involved the correspondents’ association’s annual journalism awards presentation, said Stelter, when Trump looked on while journalists earned multiple prizes, including one for “courage and accountability” in reporting that went to a team of Wall Street Journal reporters for their investigative work on a lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein with Trump’s name on it.
“Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said while presenting the award. To which “Trump laughed and threw up his hands in an aw shucks-like gesture,” according to Stelter.
“Her family had to be relocated,” Blitzer added more somberly. “The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One, but the reporters continued to file revelatory stories.”
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