7 jaw-dropping moments from Donald Trump’s racist, sexist, homophobic Correspondents Dinner speech
Donald Trump gave a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-democratic, anti-journalism speech last night at the White House Correspondents dinner.
The deeply unfunny address was littered with flubbed lines, crass insults, fat jokes and inflammatory ad libs. He meandered from prepared gags that he was clearly reading for the first time from the prompter, through murky racist conspiracy theories to vile personal attacks directed at some of his favourite targets. All of it delivered to a mostly silent room.
It was unclear throughout the speech which sections were supposed to be funny. At times there were clear setups and punchlines, but he often massacred the delivery so they fell flat or were missed in the room. But much of the speech was pure Trump invective and cruelty.
The speech capped off an otherwise humiliating night for the President. He was forced to sit and applaud as a string of journalist he’s publicly berated were handed awards for uncovering his misdeeds.
Here are the most jaw-dropping moments from the White House Correspondents Dinner.
When they gave out an award for Epstein coverage and all Trump could do was shrug
Perhaps the most preposterous part of the evening was the awards ceremony, where gongs were given out to the leading lights in American political journalism.
Among them was the staff of the Wall Street Journal, who were recognised for their reporting of Trump’s friendship with America’s most notorious paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
“Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the journal,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, giving out the awards, reminded the audience. “Revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated.”
Trump smirked, shrugged and threw up his hands in a sort of “whaddayagonnado” fashion.
He joked about serving a third term. Maybe.
Twice during his speech, Trump appeared to joke about serving an illegal third term in office. And like much of his speech, the jokes were interspersed with falsehoods we know Trump genuinely believes – which made it impossible to say for sure whether he was serious.
This is, of course, deliberate.
Referring to the event being a re-do, after the Dinner was interrupted in April by an assassination attempt, Trump said: “Just like my presidency, the second time is always better. It’s always better. And the third time we’ll be better yet.”
He made it even more explicit at the end of the speech, when he said he was giving the reporters in the room a “scoop.”
“I’m pleased to announce …my intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States,” he said. “I will be doing that, I will be having it official…in fact I think I have…”
He fumbled beneath the lectern and pulled out a “Trump 2028” hat, which he put on.
“I won three times,” he continued. “I’m going to do it again. Should be easy, I’m getting very good at running for President. I won three times. Did very well the second time by the way. Was a rigged election, but we don’t have to talk about it. You know it’s interesting, you come back and you do a good job like we did, you don’t care about it so much, but we really do have to tighten up these elections, because they’re in seriously bad shape.”
He made several jokes about the assassination attempt
Trump made several jokes about the original attempt at the event in April, which was interrupted by a would-be assassin.
“Some of you are lucky that our last dinner was cut short because I was going to go after you,” he said. “Your lives were really in danger the last time for another reason. But your careers were saved.”
He also suggested people might have struggled to find shoes that went with their bulletproof vests, and repeated an old joke he has told before about body armour making a person look 20lbs heavier.
He told fat jokes and a homophobic joke about Anderson Cooper
Trump launched a riff joking about more UFC fights taking place at the White House – including “sloppy Chris Christie”, the former Governor of New Jersey and Democrat congressman Jerry Nadler fighting “over a big piece of cheesecake…who wrote that line?”
He then suggested CNN host Anderson Cooper, who is gay, and MS Now host Laurence O’Donnell should fight.
He said: “I like Anderson actually, because he’s covered me well for many years. Then he went bad as soon as I went for politics…but you know, he’s got a little different persuasion than me. In many ways, actually.”
Trump also described several people in the speech as “nasty”. All of them women.
He did a long bit about CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins looking like a trans woman
Trump has often targeted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. He frequently complains that she is attractive but “never smiles” when she asks him difficult questions in Oval Office Q&As.
But last night he took his line of attack down a different road.
“Kaitlan Collins is a young, attractive woman. She never smiles,” he said from the stage. “Do you ever smile? I thought she had really made it big with a major new sponsorship but then I informed her that it was not her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney.”
Dylan Mulvaney is a social media personality and actor who found herself at the centre of a far-right culture war skirmish when she did a promotion for Bud Light, prompting a boycott of the brand and a wave of attacks and threats against her. In the wake of the campaign of hatred against her, Mulvaney said: “What I’m struggling to understand is the need to dehumanize and to be cruel. I just don’t think that’s right. Dehumanization has never fixed anything in history ever.”
Earlier in the evening, Collins had shaken Trump’s hand after she was given an award for her coverage of Trump’s showdown with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.
In his speech, Trump said: “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump said. “It was all about me. It was a fake, she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it.”
In a statement, a CNN spokesperson said: “Kaitlan Collins is an exceptional, trusted journalist being honoured tonight for her depth of knowledge and the context she provides to audiences all over the world. She reports every day from the White House and the field with real strength and tenacity and skilfully brings that reporting to the anchor chair and CNN platforms every day. We stand by her to the fullest extent.”
He repeated a racist conspiracy theory about a sitting member of Congress
Trump dredged up a vile, racist conspiracy theory about Ilhan Omar, an American citizen of Somali heritage, marrying her brother in order to gain entry to the United States. It is preposterously untrue.
Ms Omar came to the US in 1995, aged 17. She entered the country as a refugee, with her family, before being granted citizenship in 2000.
Ms Omar is not in the US illegally. She was granted citizenship several years before her first (legal) marriage, to a Somali British man named Ahmed Hirsi – who was not a US citizen, and so could not have helped her “get in” the country.
Other versions of the conspiracy theory claim Ms Omar married Mr Hirsi (who racists still claim without evidence is her brother), in order to get him a green card or citizenship.
Problem there is if he was her brother, he would have automatically had access to a green card and a route to citizenship as a sibling of a US citizen. There would be no need for anyone to marry anyone.
Trump not only joked about the racist lie several times, he called for Ms Omar, an American citizen, to be deported.
“Ilhan Omar – one of my favourites – and her brother are thinking about moving together,” he said. “Very much in love… She’s a low IQ person, and a very dishonest person. She ought to get the hell out of our country. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be in our country. She also calls her brother ‘husband number one’.”
He later told jokes referencing his long term fondness for describing Elizabeth Warren, who has said she has Native American ancestry, as “Pocahontas”.
His speech went down so badly that …well, this happened
Trump was visibly frustrated that none of his jokes were landing. He told one story about a senator whose wife said to him: “I want you to come up the stairs and immediately make love to me.” To which the Senator replied: “I can’t do both.”
The joke bombed so hard that Trump felt the need to explain it, which made it bomb even harder. It’s worth watching this acutely embarrassing moment.
