The president couldn’t help but acknowledge how weird it was.
“What do we do here?” he asked as he kicked off his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner redo in Washington on Friday night. “Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?”
He promised a little bit of everything.
The meandering speech he gave for the next hour inside the Waldorf Astoria, the former site of the Trump International Hotel, was full of ad hominem attacks against his political enemies, scripted jokes that fell flat and familiar refrains about the war against Iran and the construction of the White House ballroom.
At various other points he was upbeat about the news media and warm toward the hundreds of journalists sitting around him in the ballroom, three months after their annual dinner ended in chaos when a gunman burst through a security setup at the Washington Hilton across town.
But those cordial moments were fleeting and in some ways stranger than the ones in which he was hurling the usual invective.
The president who showed up to a dinner honoring the work of journalists is the same president who last week declared that “NBC and ABC fake news” should have their broadcast licenses revoked. At one point during the dinner attendees were asked to applaud the Pentagon press corps. There was no mention that Mr. Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who was in the room, has tried to kick reporters out of the Pentagon at the same time that the Trump administration is waging a new war.
This month, the administration issued subpoenas seeking phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times journalists who wrote articles revealing security concerns about Mr. Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The Times said the government was trying to intimidate its reporters and fought back in court. On Thursday, shortly after a federal judge in Manhattan scolded the Justice Department for its handling of the matter, the government withdrew the subpoenas.
One of the Times reporters who was a subject of the subpoenas, Tyler Pager, accepted an award onstage Friday.
The president shook hands with reporters including Kaitlan Collins of CNN and Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal as they walked across the stage to accept awards for their tough coverage of the White House.
One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”
Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”
As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do. Nervous laughter rippled across the ballroom.
The dinner was smaller, easier to secure, and the Waldorf made for a ritzier room. Mr. Trump reminded the crowd that he owned the place not so long ago. “It’s a luxury room,” he said. “See those beautiful chandeliers? I can tell you everything about them, if you’d like to know.”
He told some jokes about his administration.
“I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire very delicious beef tenderloin, very special beef,” he said, winding up. “And I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy, who’s right here, personally ran over the cow in his car, and he cut it up and he brought it here for you to eat tonight.”
About the nation’s health secretary, the president added: “He is a very different kind of a person.”
Moments of presidential self-deprecation were few and far between.
As the hour stretched on, his speech turned harshly political and quite vicious. He mocked the appearances and careers of individual reporters, some of whom were in the room, but much of the speech had little to do with the press. He widened the aperture to target his longtime political enemies, politicians and celebrities who had nothing to do with the dinner.
“I hate some people,” Mr. Trump said as he started in on Adam Schiff. Others who came in for a drubbing included Rosie O’Donnell, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Chris Christie and Jerry Nadler. The president wasn’t telling jokes so much as he was repeating attack lines one hears at a standard MAGA rally.
There was little laughter in the room as the president’s speech took on a harder edge. Not many people chuckled when he compared the “really beat-up faces” of UFC fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen.
Mr. Trump seemed to realize he was losing the room. After a joke he told about the gerontocracy on Capitol Hill bombed, he said: “That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech. It was the only good one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter.”
He threw his arms up in exasperation and people started to laugh again.
As his speech reached its conclusion, he pulled out a hat and with a theatrical flourish plopped it on his head. It said, “Trump 2028.” Some clapped. Others laughed. Most of the reporters just stared straight ahead.
Reporting was contributed by Michael M. Grynbaum.
