Once a year, the more or less discreet flirtation between the power of Washington and the press that covers it turns into something else: a night of torrid love for the whole world to see. It happens on the occasion of the celebration of the dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, a tradition in which notebooks and microphones are left at the door of the gigantic hall of the Hilton hotel where it is celebrated to make way for an evening of camaraderie or, depending on how you look at it, networking. The holiday has more than a century of history and is celebrated both in honor of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press in this country, and of the president of the day. True to tradition, Joe Biden offered a humorous speech this Saturday, peppered with jokes about his advanced age, but, above all, about his Republican opponent in the November elections, Donald Trump.
Several hundred protesters stood outside the two doors of the Hilton hours before the start of the ceremony to protest the war in Gaza, and Washington’s support for Israel. At the arrival of the nearly three thousand guests (them in tuxedos; the women in long suits) they shouted phrases like “You’re embarrassing!” or “Free Palestine.” At the back entrance, near the place where in 1981 a lunatic almost assassinated another president, Ronald Reagan, there were journalists’ vests lying on the ground to honor the reporters who fell in the attacks of the Israeli Army, during a war that It followed the brutal attacks by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, which has already caused more than 34,000 deaths, according to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The memory of these professionals was completely absent in Biden’s words, who also did not make any reference during the 10 minutes of his speech to the situation in the Middle East or to the influence that his support for Benjamin Netanyahu may have on his re-election, especially among the young electorate and among Arab Americans.
The only one on stage who referred to the matter was NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell, the president of the Correspondents’ Association, an entity that brings together 800 reporters who cover the White House. O’Donnell mentioned in passing the “around 100 journalists who have died around the world since October, most of them in Gaza.” She took longer to lament the cases of the detainees: like the correspondent of The Wall Street Journal in Moscow Evan Gershkovich, who has been in prison in Russia for more than a year (“Putin should release him,” Biden said), or Austin Tice, whose current whereabouts are not entirely certain, but he was kidnapped in 2012 in Syria . Relatives of both were among those attending the gala.
The president took advantage of his monologue to downplay the issue of his advanced age (he will be 82 years old when he is sworn in again as president, if he manages to be re-elected), as well as to attack Trump, who, while in office, never wanted to participate at the correspondents’ dinner. “The 2024 elections are in full swing and yes, age will be an issue. “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old child,” Biden said of his 77-year-old Republican opponent, whom he called “sleepy Don,” thus reversing one of the nicknames Trump gave him in the campaign. 2020 election. Biden was referring to one of the magnate’s multiple legal troubles and the fact that the witnesses present in court during the trial being carried out against him in New York for the payment to buy the silence of the porn star Stormy Daniels recounted that the former president could not help but fall asleep in the dock.
Biden also drew blood with the disconcerting speech his predecessor recently gave at Gettysburg, a crucial battlefield of the Civil War. ”Listening to it,” he said, “I think the statue of General (Confederate Robert. E.) Lee knelt again to surrender.” He thanked the work of his “friends in the press,” paused, and added, “as well as that of (the conservative network) Fox News,” and gave more friendly jabs to newspapers like The New York Times. “You are more important than ever,” he added about traditional media. “I am not asking you to take sides, but I am asking you to be aware of what is at stake in these elections,” she stated.
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When he finished, the reply was given to him by a comedian, as tradition also dictates. The chosen one was Colin Jost, member Saturday Night Live, leading comedy television program in which he presents, along with Michael Che, the alternative news program that splits the broadcast in two. Jost brought up more jokes about Biden’s age, asking Trump to make up his mind (the president, he said, cannot be at the same time “a senile man and a criminal mastermind who has orchestrated the four trials to which (his rival) faces”) and confessed that he loves Washington and that the last time he was here he forgot about “cocaine in the White House.” With that joke, the comedian was referring to a surreal episode last summer, when the Secret Service ordered the closure of the presidential residence after finding a bag with drugs inside. “Fortunately, Biden was able to take advantage of it in his State of the Union,” added Jost, provoking laughter from those present, whose memory came back to the image of the Democrat’s energetic performance during his solemn traditional speech to Congress last March.
Con Scarlett Johansson
Jost did make a distant reference to the Gaza war, with a mention of the student protests that intensified last week at Columbia University, a place that he defined as “a hot stage of world geopolitics.” He then joked, resorting to the use of silences that are part of his humorous technique, about some of the media present. (”The New York Times and (the tabloid) New York Post, “They’re not that different,” he said, “the second one is like the first one was told to you by a crack addict”), and he made a joke about Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband. “I’m also used to being the second man,” said the comedian, who is married to actress Scarlett Johansson. She attended from one of the tables closest to the stage her husband’s almost 25-minute monologue, which ended with the comedian remembering in a serious tone that his grandfather voted for Biden, because he saw in him, he said, “an honest man.” ”.
Johansson was the brightest star of the night, the one that everyone – even influential politicians, from Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a rising Democrat with his own legion of fans, to Secretaries of State, Antony Blinken, or the Treasure, Janet Yellen―they wanted to come up to say hello or ask for a photo. She could also be seen with actress Rachel Brosnahan (from the series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) on one of the tables purchased by CNN; the French actor Jean Reno; to the mad Men John Hamm, who was having a drink at the hotel bar as if the party wasn’t with him; and the brand new Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph (for the film Those who stay).
All of them, along with hundreds of journalists, crowded around the tables in the room where the gala was held, while the waiters juggled to serve the dishes. They call this night “the Oscars of Washington,” a city that political commentator Paul Begala made it fashionable in the eighties to define as “the Hollywood of the ugly.” It is also that occasion in which the concentric circles of power in the American capital seem to forget for a few hours their deeply hierarchical rules.
When Jost had cracked the last of his jokes, those rules went back into effect as attendees left the hotel for the exclusive after-parties. At the doors of the Hilton, a few protesters continued shouting against the celebration of a gala whose boycott a dozen Gazan journalists unsuccessfully called for last week. By then, the president and the first lady, Jill Biden, had already left the premises in the caravan of their armored vehicles, which had to find an alternative route to that of previous years to arrive and leave without encountering the echoes of a war in Middle East that could define not only his future as a tenant of the White House, but also his place in history. Little joke.