A Surreal Spectacle at the WHCD

A Surreal Spectacle at the WHCD
by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump, it was clear, really, really wanted to have his moment at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He’d skipped them during his first term, but had been looking forward to this year’s—until the April event ended in chaos and panic after a would-be assassination attempt. Even then he’d wanted to continue. “We held out right till the end,” he said in the aftermath. “But they didn’t want to take a chance.” But he promised they’d reschedule: “I am ready, willing, and able. And I was all set to really rip it,” he said. “So I’ll have to save it.”

Trump finally got his rescheduled dinner on Friday. And, as promised, he ripped it, after a fashion. In his rambling, hour-long speech, Trump heaped insults on the reporters in the room, went after his political enemies with a host of colorful epithets (that they’re fat, mostly), insisted he’d won the election in 2020, and joked (?) that he’d run again in 2028.

And yet even as he delivered it, it was plain the speech wasn’t shaping up as he imagined it would. To his apparent surprise, a room full of journalists he’s spent a decade deriding as “the enemy of the people” makes for a pretty tough crowd. As punchline after punchline landed with a thud, Trump started openly grousing about the bad jokes he’d been given.


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“The other day, a senator I know got a text—a great guy—from his wife,” Trump said. “And she said, when you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me. And he said, I can’t do both.” Crickets.


Why Do We Say “Crickets” When It’s Silent?
Cricket chirps can reach 100 decibels. So why do we use them as a byword for ‘silence’?
By
Mark Peters
|
Jul 15, 2024

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Even this cricket wants to know the answer.
Even this cricket wants to know the answer. | ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images (cricket), Gokcemim/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images (background)
What are the sounds of silence? With all due respect to Simon and Garfunkel, the most common answer is “crickets.” This noisy insect has somehow become synonymous with no sound at all.

This sense of the word crickets has yet to make the Oxford English Dictionary (though it surely will eventually). Still, it has plentiful coverage in Merriam-Webster, which added it to the dictionary in September 2023 with the definition “a conspicuous lack of response.” In discussing the term in a “Words We’re Watching” feature—which cites examples going back to the early 2000s—Merriam-Webster describes how crickets originally conveyed a sense of a rural setting:

“Crickets are often used by writers to convey atmosphere or to create a sense of place. That is, not the insects themselves, but rather the sound that crickets make. The chirping of crickets is the sound of nature on a summer night, and it has become a kind of cultural shorthand that indicates much with a single word: the setting is far from the city and far from people.”

The term seems to have evolved from senses indicating a rural setting—which is less noisy than the city by a lot—to any place or stretch of time quiet enough that, in theory, only the sound of crickets could be heard, as in this example from the 2007 novel Agnes and the Hitman: “There was a silence long enough to hear crickets in, and Agnes thought, If he makes some crack about me being not little, I’m gonna hit him again, and then he spoke.”


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“In other words, can’t go up the stairs and make love,” Trump explained. “Does anybody get that? Well, I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole frickin’ stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter.”

He tried one more time: “I think, you know, in other words, you can’t go up the stairs and make love to a woman. So we’re looking for term limits. Does anybody understand this stuff?”

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And so on and so on. Nobody likes to bomb on stage, but you have to imagine it was a particularly distasteful experience for Trump, who spends his entire life these days nestled snugly in a cocoon of over-the-top praise and adulation from the people he surrounds himself with—his staff, his online fans, his rally crowds, the business tycoons and world leaders who know how much he loves to be buttered up. Every room he’s in is happy to guffaw the second they sense he’s even attempting a joke, so why not this one? Must just be this terrible material his speechwriters handed him, the president decided.

The silly spectacle of the WHCD has always loomed large both in Washington’s psychology and in Trump’s own. Fifteen years ago, at the 2011 dinner, Trump sat stone-faced in the audience suffering roast after roast from President Barack Obama and emcee Seth Meyers. It’s long been speculated that Trump’s grievance over that night helped fuel his ultimate decision to run for president for real, ushering us all into this deeply stupid chapter in American history.

Since then, Trump has succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings in twisting the country and the world into his own clownish image. And yet it’s remarkable how much this would-be great man of history still cares about the two-bit prestige of what he perceives as America’s elite institutions like the WHCD. He’s spent his presidency raking in billions of dollars and luxuriating in the obeisance of the wealthiest and the most powerful people in the world. And yet somehow he still has a hunger to go into a black tie event to try to win the affection of people he sees on TV, no matter how hopeless his prospects. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he can’t even get a chuckle out of Wolf Blitzer?


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What does Trump profit  from gaining the whole world if he can’t even get a single chuckle out of the whole audience of WHCD by telling a single stupid joke ..."
Seth Meyers