‘Is This
Supposed to Be Fun?’ Trump Hurls Insults at Correspondents’ Dinner
President
Trump gave the keynote speech as relations between his administration and the
press continue to deteriorate.
Shawn
McCreesh
By Shawn
McCreesh
Shawn
McCreesh reported from the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
July 25,
2026, 12:25 a.m. ET
The
president couldn’t help but acknowledge how weird it was.
“What do
we do here?” he asked as he kicked off his speech at the White House
Correspondents’ Association dinner redo in Washington on Friday night. “Is this
supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a
comedian?”
He
promised a little bit of everything.
The
meandering speech he gave for the next hour inside the Waldorf Astoria, the
former site of the Trump International Hotel, was full of ad hominem attacks
against his political enemies, scripted jokes that fell flat and familiar
refrains about the war against Iran and the construction of the White House
ballroom.
At
various other points he was upbeat about the news media and warm toward the
hundreds of journalists sitting around him in the ballroom, three months after
their annual dinner ended in chaos when a gunman burst through a security setup
at the Washington Hilton across town.
But those
cordial moments were fleeting and in some ways stranger than the ones in which
he was hurling the usual invective.
The
president who showed up to a dinner honoring the work of journalists is the
same president who last week declared that “NBC and ABC fake news” should have
their broadcast licenses revoked. At one point during the dinner attendees were
asked to applaud the Pentagon press corps. There was no mention that Mr.
Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who was in the room, has tried to kick
reporters out of the Pentagon at the same time that the Trump administration is
waging a new war.
This
month, the administration issued subpoenas seeking phone records and grand jury
testimony from New York Times journalists who wrote articles revealing security
concerns about Mr. Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The Times
said the government was trying to intimidate its reporters and fought back in
court. On Thursday, shortly after a federal judge in Manhattan scolded the
Justice Department for its handling of the matter, the government withdrew the
subpoenas.
One of
the Times reporters who was a subject of the subpoenas, Tyler Pager, accepted
an award onstage Friday.
The
president shook hands with reporters including Kaitlan Collins of CNN and Josh
Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal as they walked across the stage to accept
awards for their tough coverage of the White House.
One
particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group
of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for
their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with
financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein
files.”
Mr.
Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit
against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her
family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”
As the
reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically,
as if to say, Oh well, what can you do. Nervous laughter rippled across the
ballroom.
The
dinner was smaller, easier to secure, and the Waldorf made for a ritzier room.
Mr. Trump reminded the crowd that he owned the place not so long ago. “It’s a
luxury room,” he said. “See those beautiful chandeliers? I can tell you
everything about them, if you’d like to know.”
He told
some jokes about his administration.
“I hope
that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire very delicious beef tenderloin,
very special beef,” he said, winding up. “And I want you all to know that Bobby
Kennedy, who’s right here, personally ran over the cow in his car, and he cut
it up and he brought it here for you to eat tonight.”
About the
nation’s health secretary, the president added: “He is a very different kind of
a person.”
Moments
of presidential self-deprecation were few and far between.
As the
hour stretched on, his speech turned harshly political and quite vicious. He
mocked the appearances and careers of individual reporters, some of whom were
in the room, but much of the speech had little to do with the press. He widened
the aperture to target his longtime political enemies, politicians and
celebrities who had nothing to do with the dinner.
“I hate
some people,” Mr. Trump said as he started in on Adam Schiff. Others who came
in for a drubbing included Rosie O’Donnell, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Chris
Christie and Jerry Nadler. The president wasn’t telling jokes so much as he was
repeating attack lines one hears at a standard MAGA rally.
There was
little laughter in the room as the president’s speech took on a harder edge.
Not many people chuckled when he compared the “really beat-up faces” of UFC
fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen.
Mr. Trump
seemed to realize he was losing the room. After a joke he told about the
gerontocracy on Capitol Hill bombed, he said: “That was actually the only thing
I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech. It was the only good
one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter.”
He threw
his arms up in exasperation and people started to laugh again.
As his
speech reached its conclusion, he pulled out a hat and with a theatrical
flourish plopped it on his head. It said, “Trump 2028.” Some clapped. Others
laughed. Most of the reporters just stared straight ahead.
Reporting
was contributed by Michael M. Grynbaum.
Shawn
McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump
administration.
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