WASHINGTON: On Saturday afternoon, President Donald Trump took another swing at his favourite punching bag. “Mainstream Media in US is being mocked all over the world,” he tweeted. “They’ve gone CRAZY!”
On Saturday night, however, Trump joined the very journalists he loves to malign for an evening of humorous — and sometimes uncomfortable — verbal sparring at the 133rd annual Gridiron Club Dinner.
Dressed in white tie and tails, Trump made his first foray into a Washington social scene that includes a series of high-profile gatherings of journalists and politicians.
“It’s been a really calm week at the White House,” Trump deadpanned to journalists who had spent the past several days documenting the chaos inside his administration. “I’m very excited to come here and ruin your evening in person.”
The dinner was filled with members of the establishment — the Washington “swamp” that Trump once vowed to drain. James Carville and Mary Matalin, the Democrat-and-Republican power-couple strategists, were there. So was Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions attended even in the wake of a nasty attack last week by Trump, who traces many of his woes to Sessions’ decision to step aside from the Russia inquiry. (Trump joked that he had offered Sessions a ride to the event but that he had “recused himself.”)
And Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was there with his wife, Ivanka Trump, just days after his security clearance was downgraded amid concerns about his FBI background check.
“We were late tonight because Jared could not get through security,” Trump joked.
‘Chaos is his genius’
The dinner features speeches, skits and songs performed by the club’s members and invited political guests. In his opening remarks, David Lightman, the president of the club and a national political reporter for McClatchy, motioned to Trump, saying, “For the first time, he is eating at a hotel that he doesn’t own.”
One skit featured the characters of Vice-President Mike Pence and Hope Hicks, Trump’s closest aide, who is departing. “Chaos is his genius,” the Hicks character says.
But the highlight of the night always comes when the journalists offer the stage to the president for some self-deprecating jokes and good-natured roasting.
For Trump, who has spent a lifetime flouting political correctness, his participation in the dinner was striking because the club is the Washington embodiment of political correctness. Its credo is that the roasts should “singe but never burn.”
This year, Trump leant into the flame.
He took aim at his favourite target: “Fake News CNN.” He called Fox News the “fourth branch of government.” And he made fun of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who stepped down in December as publisher of The New York Times, saying: “I inherited millions. Arthur inherited billions of dollars, and he turned it into millions.”
The president also poked fun at Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who many inside the White House believe was the source for some of the nastiest parts of the recent book by Michael Wolff.
Bannon, the president said, “leaked more than the Titanic.”
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And he directed a jab at himself over his infatuation with the size of his inauguration crowd, claiming credit for all the crowds at the recently completed Winter Olympics in South Korea.
The relationship between any president and the press is fraught. But it is especially true for Trump, who spent his first year in the Oval Office in a near constant state of agitation about what he views as a media establishment that is unfair and plotting against him.
It wasn’t always so. As a real estate developer and later a reality TV star, Trump eagerly sought the media’s attention, basking in the celebrity that produced front page articles and frequent appearances on news programmes.
As president, he remains drawn to the TV lights and the newspaper headlines, often conducting discussions and negotiations live on television. But he also complains bitterly when the stories turn negative or personal.
During his remarks Saturday, he acknowledged one of those storylines: that his administration is in constant chaos.
“I like turnover. I like chaos,” Trump said. “It really is good. Who is going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”
At that point, he looked out to his wife and asked whether she still loved him.
The Gridiron dinner has long been a bipartisan venue for good-natured ribbing at times when tensions between the media, lawmakers and the president are at their highest.
In 2011, President Barack Obama took a few swipes at the conservative media, saying that he enjoyed doing an interview during the Super Bowl with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. “I don’t often get a chance to be in a room with an ego that’s bigger than mine,” he joked.
