Trump Lights Up the White House Correspondents Dinner With Jokes, Jabs, and a ‘Trump 2028’ Hat

President Trump made his long-awaited debut at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Friday night, trading barbs with the press, roasting his own Cabinet, and somehow making bulletproof vests the punchline of the evening.The dinner — rescheduled from April after a gunman breached security outside the original venue — was held at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. Mr. Trump arrived ready to perform, and perform he did, speaking for more than an hour in a speech that veered from genuinely heartfelt praise to barbed animosity, sometimes within the same sentence.In a faux moment of delivering breaking news to the roomful of journalists, Mr. Trump announced that he would be running again in 2028. “But just like my presidency, the second time is always better. It’s always better, and the third time will be better yet,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, donning a red cap that said “Trump 2028.”He warned the gathering of journalists about what awaits them when he departs. “When I’m not around, you’re all going to be broke,” he said to laughter.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bore the brunt of some of the night’s sharpest jokes. Mr. Trump informed dinner guests that their beef tenderloin was “very special” because “Bobby Kennedy personally ran over the cow with his car.” He then revealed that Mr. Kennedy had proposed an appetizer of “his favorite cut of male raccoon roadkill.” Mr. Kennedy, for his part, sat in the front row and took it.Mr. Trump also riffed on the April assassination attempt. When shots rang out at the original dinner, Grammy-nominated rapper Nicki Minaj was in the crowd. “After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ — which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” the president quipped.He followed that up by revealing a personal struggle few world leaders have publicly addressed: finding footwear that pairs well with a bulletproof vest. “Everyone’s looking really good tonight, and I know it was not easy finding shoes to go along with your bulletproof vest, which many people didn’t want to wear because they’d rather die than look 20 pounds heavier,” he jested.Not everything went smoothly in his hourlong speech. After a bombed bawdy joke, he said, “That was actually the only thing that I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote.”He targeted anyone and everyone, including his own press secretary. Mr. Trump praised Karoline Leavitt as doing “a fantastic job” before noting that “she could be nasty” — adding, “But I’m probably being a little bit oversensitive.”Mr. Trump, who attended without first lady Melania Trump, faced an awkward moment when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer presented the “Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability” to reporters at the Wall Street Journal — the same outlet Mr. Trump had sued for $10 billion.The WSJ journalists were honored for their reporting on an alleged “birthday card” Mr. Trump purportedly signed for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, compiled by his associate Ghislaine Maxwell. After Mr. Blitzer noted that Mr. Trump had filed suit and exposed one reporter’s home address, cameras caught the president shrugging and unsmiling.Despite the tension, Mr. Trump stood and shook hands with each honored journalist. He later quipped during his own remarks, “Do I get a say?” Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against the WSJ was dismissed by a federal judge in mid-April.Despite the roast-style delivery, the night had its lighter moments. The WHCA president, Weijia Jiang. toasted the First Amendment, and ABC’s Jon Karl thanked Mr. Trump directly for showing up. The president, in turn, told the room he had “tremendous respect” for journalists — while also calling them “the largest group of Trump derangement syndrome people ever put together at one time.”After the president’s time, mentalist Oz Pearlman tried to follow the act. “Imagine you have a globe in your hand,” Mr. Pearlman said to a Fox News correspondent, David Spun, asking him to pick a spot on the globepr. He then wrote “Big Sur” on a huge pad of paper displayed to the audience, but when he asked Mr. Spun what place he had chosen, he said “Taj Mahal.”

Trump Lights Up the White House Correspondents Dinner With Jokes, Jabs, and a ‘Trump 2028’ Hat

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