Trump forced to play good sport at correspondents’ dinner – but it couldn’t last

President’s speech started well enough but quickly moved to the usual insults, taunts, jokes and grievances

This time, at least, everyone got to finish their dinner.

And any urge to hide under the table was driven not by the barking commands of Secret Service agents on alert against a marauding gunman, but by a desire to escape the tedium of a meandering speech from Donald Trump that strayed quickly and wildly from the matter at hand into the weeds of his normal stump addresses.

For more than two hours at Friday’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Trump was forced to play the good sport; smiling and applauding while awards were bestowed on journalistic foes he berates daily as purveyors of “fake news” and plaudits heaped on past presidents he loathes.

But eventually something had to give. Trump had to be Trump, insults had to be hurled, some of them stale and familiar, a few of them funny, all of them grievously petty.

As often happens with his stump speeches these days, the president lost his audience. Phones were gazed at, silence ensued. Never more so than when he embarked on a tiresome bigoted diatribe against the Democratic representative from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, one of his frequent targets.

Trump was finally getting to deliver his maiden speech as president to the association’s annual marquee gathering that a alleged would-be assassin had denied him by trying to storm the original event in April, before being foiled by Secret Service agents.

Both the association and Trump had decreed such an act of political violence could not be accepted as the final word. So a rescheduled dinner was arranged – but with significant adjustments.

Instead of the vast auditorium at the Washington Hilton – the dinner’s venue for several decades and once the site of an attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan – the Astoria Waldorf was chosen to stage a drastically scaled-down dinner, with just 700 guests attending, compared with the 2,600 who were at the original event in April.

Given the upheaval that unfolded then, the greater visibility of armed security personnel – even for a much smaller guest list – was unsurprising.

Weijia Jiang, the outgoing WHCA president, vowed in advance that the restaged dinner would be “more intimate”.

Trump, when he spoke – after being forcibly humbled by the dishing out of awards to a succession of journalists for their unflattering portrayal of his presidency – quickly established that humility would not feature strongly in his speech.

His first comment on the changed venue was to observe that he had once owned it, when it was the Trump International Hotel.

“This has not been an easy evening. All these awards. Do I have a say?” he asked. “But it’s great to be back at a place that I know very well because I built it, and I’m very proud of it because I built it for $2.9bn less than the Federal Reserve Building, which is a lot smaller, by the way.”

To his credit, he quickly entered the intended spirit by invoking the episode that had caused everyone to be there in the first place.

“Tonight we come back together to answer that heinous attack with unwavering resolve, and every one of us here this evening to show that in America we do not yield to political violence,” Trump said to applause. “So in this country, we believe in freedom of speech. We settle our differences not with bullets, but with open and vigorous debate.”

It seemed an apt response to Jiang’s appeal, based on the event’s theme of “celebrating the first amendment”, to respect and honor the media’s place in American life.

“Many founders [of the US constitution] couldn’t stand the press … but they understood our access is restricted,” she said. “If the media faces government pressure or censorship, it’s the people who end up knowing less. There is a difference, though, an existential difference between criticizing the press and trying to undermine it.”

But that was as high-minded and worthy as Trump was willing to allow.

From there, it was on to the insults, taunts, jokes – and grievances. Some of it was amusing and drew laughter, notably when he jested at the expense of the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire, very delicious beef tenderloins, very special beef,” he said. “And I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy, who’s right here, personally ran over the cow and he cut it up, and he brought it here for you to eat tonight. Bobby also suggested appetizer featuring his favorite cut of male raccoon roadkill, but we drew the line at that.”

Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator for California and a particular Trump bete noire, was mocked as “watermelon head because he has the largest head I’ve ever seen with the smallest pencil neck”.

Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, all comedians who have mocked Trump unceasingly, were derided as “people without talent”.

Trump said the speech was much more generous than the one he had planned to give in April before the gunman and would-be alleged assassin, Cole Tomas Allen, stole his thunder.

But what could have been going through his mind as Wolf Blitzer, the veteran CNN anchor who famously witnessed the shooting scenes at the original dinner, announced that the Katharine Graham award for courage and accountability was going to a Wall Street Journal team who had reported on the president’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

In the event, Trump shook hands with the team’s members, including one journalist whose home address had been disclosed in a $20bn suit he filed against the paper, forcing the reporter’s family to have to move home.

“I hope you all know that I believe in the free press more than anyone in this room,” Trump told the gathering later, overlooking the fact that his administration had filed subpoenas for several New York Times reporters and their relatives after the paper had reported on security breaches on the new Air Force One jet, gifted by Qatar.

“You people have no idea how lucky you are. When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke. There’s not going to be anybody to report on.”

As he wound up, the sound system blared out YMCA by the Village People. By then, Trump had been talking for 65 minutes, paeans of praise to the founding fathers and journalistic bravery had been forgotten – and there seemed little doubt about whose event it really was.