Donald Trump, who has regularly attacked the press over its coverage of him and his presidency, praised journalists for doing an \u201camazing job\u201d as he addressed the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner.<\/p>\n
A day after the Trump administration abandoned, for now, an extraordinary bid to subpoena reporters<\/a> over their coverage, the US president attended the rescheduled White House correspondents\u2019 dinner \u2013 an annual celebration of press freedom \u2013 in Washington on Friday evening.<\/p>\n It came three months after the original event was scrapped in April when a man fired a shotgun at a security checkpoint<\/a> outside the ballroom.<\/p>\n The president continued to attack the media on Friday. Insisting his war on Iran was going \u201cextremely well\u201d, he told a roomful of journalists: \u201cDon\u2019t believe the fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump and his officials joined hundreds of reporters at the Waldorf Astoria, a smaller venue than the vast Washington Hilton ballroom that was evacuated when shots were fired in April, in a suspected targeting of the president and his administration.<\/p>\n The speech included a handful of scripted jokes, one at the expense of Robert F Kennedy, his health secretary, who he quipped had personally run over the cow that became the evening\u2019s \u201cvery delicious beef tenderloin\u201d. Kennedy has championed the health benefits of beef tallow and animal protein.<\/p>\n But much of the evening was devoted to a bitter, caustic roast of his political opponents. He mocked the weight of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and Jerry Nadler, the New York congressman, imagining the two wrestling over a piece of cheesecake. He also ridiculed the appearance of his critics, including Bruce Springsteen who he said \u201clooks like hell\u201d and took aim at CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins, who had been honored earlier for her White House coverage, saying she does not smile enough. Trump said he \u201chated\u201d Adam Schiff, a Democratic California senator, and one of his most prominent congressional critics, while mocking the size of his head and neck.<\/p>\n At one point, after a joke about term limits fell flat, Trump broke the fourth wall, asking the audience whether anyone understood \u201cthis whole freakin stupid speech that they wrote\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump ended his remarks with a line that landed awkwardly, declaring that he planned to run and win a fourth election \u2013 a reference both to his false claim he won the 2020 election and to his repeated suggestion that he could seek a third term, despite the constitution\u2019s two-term limit.<\/p>\n \u201cI won three times, now I\u2019m going to do it again,\u201d the president said, placing a red \u201cTrump 2028\u201d hat on his head.<\/p>\n Before Trump spoke on Friday, a series of journalists who published revealing stories on the president and his administration \u2013 including the team behind the Wall Street Journal story<\/a> alleging he had sent a \u201cbawdy\u201d letter to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 \u2013 received awards on stage. Trump has sued the Journal<\/a> over its reporting.<\/p>\n Weija Jiang, outgoing president of the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association, had sought to underline the importance of duty \u2013 both for those in the White House, and the people who cover them.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter how complicated or tense the relationship is between the press and the presidency, what we share is far more important than anything else and that is our duty: to serve the American people,\u201d Jiang told the dinner.<\/p>\n Beginning his remarks, Trump claimed the speech he had originally prepared was \u201cgonna be a doozy\u201d, suggesting he would pare back his attacks at the rescheduled event: \u201cJust like my presidency, the second time is always better \u2013 and the third time will be better yet \u2026 I\u2019m only kidding.\u201d<\/p>\n The usually celebratory dinner was dedicated in part to Victor Gonzales, a Secret Service officer who was shot and wounded at the original correspondents\u2019 dinner in April while helping stop the gunman, and hotel staff who helped guests during the attack.<\/p>\n The man charged for the shooting, Cole Allen, has pleaded not guilty to attempting to assassinate the president.<\/p>\n An advance team spent weeks putting together a security plan for the new venue, and Sean Curran, the US Secret Service director, told reporters this week that agents were braced for trouble even at the black-tie dinner. \u201cWe do expect bad people to show up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While it is customary for presidents to address the annual White House correspondents\u2019 dinner, Friday\u2019s speech is the first Trump has made at the event in either of his two terms. He boycotted the dinner throughout his first term, and has long attacked the press corps, including many of the journalists in the room.<\/p>\n \u201cIt matters that you came here tonight,\u201d Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent at ABC News, told the president on stage.<\/p>\n Trump has sued multiple news organizations over their coverage of him, and routinely dismisses unfavorable stories as \u201cfake news\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s administration has gone further still, barring the Associated Press from the White House press pool and limiting other journalists\u2019 access to the Pentagon.<\/p>\n Missing from the guest list this time: Melania Trump, the US first lady; JD Vance, the vice-president; and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. All had been present in April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump, who has regularly attacked the press over its coverage of him and his presidency, praised journalists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-822217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}