TIRED: Trump’s Press Corps Speech Proved Just How OVER Everyone Is With All This Bullshit
He was tired. The room was tired. The ritual was tired. And the reviews calling it a bomb are the most tired thing of all.
The President of the United States stood at a podium for the better part of an hour and delivered rally material to a ballroom of journalists who responded mostly with silence.
People checked their phones, ate macarons, and eventually drifted to the lobby and came back for the mentalist. At one point President Donald Trump looked up from a joke that had just died and told the room it was “the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech.” Even the headliner was panning his own show.
There is a word for what happened Friday, and it is not “bombed.” The word is tired.
I mean that in the full sense. Not sleepy or low energy, though God knows there was plenty of that. I mean tired the way the word was used in ’90s queer vernacular that filtered into the mainstream culture from Paris Is Burning. It was played out, lame as fuck, a thing that stopped being interesting a long time ago and is the last to know it. Tired is a verdict, and it is the correct verdict on every single party in that room.
And it’s not just Trump’s schtick that’s overplayed at this point, though it is. It’s the entire symbiotic sycophancy illustrated by a room full of access and proximity seekers who will also be the 8th grade mean girls talking shit about the kid they invited to their cool kid cafeteria table. Two-faced assholes, not just in the room but opining on it live on cable news
The morning-after consensus is that Trump bombed, and yes, technically, he did. But much of that critique is coming from people who thought the booking was fine on Thursday. A bad review the next morning is a strange substitute for judgment the night before. More to the point, is anyone surprised? Trump has exactly one mode, aggrieved rally mode, and lately it bores even the people who eagerly go to see it. Even the crowds at his actual rallies thin out and drift.
Booking this act for a room full of people he is currently suing and subpoenaing was never going to produce comedy. It produced what it always does now, which is a man grinding through material he visibly does not enjoy, in front of people who visibly do not want to be there. When he started heckling his own speech from the podium, he was doing the room’s job for it. Nobody else could be bothered .
The press corps in that ballroom seemed eager to show how much they loathed being there, and yet… they were still there!
Too invested to leave, too depleted to laugh, too compromised to object. The most defiance anyone could summon for the man whose Justice Department subpoenaed their colleagues’ family phone records was divided attention and a dessert tray. They sat through the insults, they stayed for the mind reader, and they went home.
No public speaker directly confronted Trump over his constant attack on the First Amendment or the DOJ going after the press. But there was a confrontation during the proceedings that happened entirely in code.
The awards handed out earlier in the evening were not an accident of curation. The Wall Street Journal won for the Jeffrey Epstein birthday poem story that Trump denied and is threatening to sue over. Kaitlan Collins, his favorite target, was honored, and hours later he insulted her from the podium in the sophomoric register of a mean eighth grader. A Getty photographer won for the image of Trump holding his pose in front of the Resolute Desk while a man who had fainted lay on the floor behind him. None of it flattered the guest of honor; all of it was by design, which you could feel from your couch, along with the self-satisfaction of a WHCA that arranged the whole tired ordeal.
So the WHCA honored the very journalism that Trump hates, while assiduously avoiding any vocal defense of the journalists Trump is hunting. Giving out an award is safe because it doesn’t ask anything of the room and requires nothing from Trump. But bravely saying something at the podium to Trump’s face about how his DOJ tried to seize the phone records of a reporter’s mother would have cost something real: Access, proximity, and professional standing with the White House. Precisely nobody was willing to pay it, which reveals an understood contract that makes no one look good.
The annual black-tie ritual between a press corps that needs access and a president who needs them as an enemy survived the thing that should have ended the pretense: a gunman attacking this dinner in April. The WHCA responded by shrinking the guest list, moving the party to a hotel Trump used to own, and putting on the same kayfabe show.
Then it gave an award to a photograph of Trump holding his pose for the camera while something had gone visibly wrong behind him. The ballroom spent the next hour reenacting it.
So yeah, I tuned in last night as I am in the top one percent of Americans professionally and personally invested in this event. I have spent my career watching the press and the presidency perform for and against each other, and this dinner is must-watch TV. But I did not make it to the end. Somewhere in the back half of the speech, with the room silent and the president complaining about his own jokes, I turned it off and went to bed.
Not in protest. Not in disgust. I was just, in every sense of the word, tired.