Opinion: How Trump took the shine off Washington's glitziest night
With the White House Correspondents’ Dinner fast arriving on the Washington social calendar, the standard pose in the capital is one of detachment and disavowal:
Sign up for POLITICO Magazine’s email of the week’s best, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This week, as reporters and producers drag out their once-a-year tuxedos and gowns, journalists in the capital are facing a paradox, painful or amusing depending on one’s point of view: The dinner actuallytransforming into the more subdued and earnest event that journalists have long claimed to desire. And as the evening becomes a dry professional awards ceremony, it’s Donald Trump, the most celebrity-oriented and raucously irreverent president in history, who can take much of the credit.
Trump, after last year’s performance by Wolf, took to Twitter to lambast her “filthy” routine and called the dinner “an embarrassment to everyone associated with it.” He implored, “Put Dinner to rest, or start over!” However laudable, Knox’s effort to recalibrate the tenor of the dinner will likely prove transient, if the history of the past couple decades is any guide. The event has long swung pendulum-like between attempts to be edgy enough to be interesting and a more risk-averse approach, protecting the sensibilities of a crowd that typically enjoys irreverence toward the president and other politicians but is put off by anything suggesting contempt.
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