President Donald Trump’s vicious hour-long White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech was so bad that a bipartisan CNN panel found common ground trashing it.
A Republican congressman and a former Trump administration aide were among the five panelists on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday who said the speech could have been funnier.
“He bombed, but the most offensive thing about it was that it wasn’t funny,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a communications director in the first Trump administration, said.
“President Trump, by the way, can be funny, Mike and I have both seen it, he’s very capable of being funny. That did not show up,” she continued.
“I asked myself at the end of what felt like 90 minutes we’ll never get back of our lives, what was the point of that?”
Griffin said she had wondered in advance if Trump, 80, might use the opportunity to announce policy or to make a strong argument for his voter ID push, but in the end he just worked through his “greatest hits.”
“He didn’t really seem to have any goal...I’m not sure why he was there to be honest,” was her brutal conclusion.
“I thought it was just mean. It was mean-spirited; it wasn’t funny. It’s supposed to be an entertaining, fun night, and it was just, I thought, mean-spirited,” Democrat Congressman Tom Suozzi added.
But even though Republican Congressman Mike Lawler tried to be less scathing, he still couldn’t find anything positive to say.
“I’ve seen him be very funny, I think he could have been funnier. I’m not somebody who gets offended by humor, I think often times people throw barbs,” he began, casting his net around for any positive line.
“Frankly, some of the stuff that’s said on CNN about the president in real time is a lot harsher than anything he threw on Friday night,” he offered to a panel that looked unconvinced.
“At the end of the day it’s an event that is supposed to unify the politicians and the press, but I definitely think the president could have brought a little more levity to it than he did,” he concluded.
Civil rights advocate Maya Wiley cut straight to the point.
“Unfunny, mean, all of the above,” she said, before decrying the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as having lost sight of its true purpose to be a strong symbol of the power of the First Amendment.
Instead, she said, “we also saw a president attacking journalists.”
A point that host Dana Bash—who was unable to hide the disbelief on her face as the camera cut to her after a highlight reel of Trump’s insults at the top of the segment—picked up on.
She reiterated CNN’s support for White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who Trump attacked in his speech. Collins had won an award at the dinner, and Bash said the award was a reflection of “who she is as a journalist, not what we heard from the president.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
