America may be the shining city on top of the hill, where free speech and soda cans are endless, but it has its fair share of idiosyncrasies reflected in the vitriolic issues that divide the nation, like abortion, gun control, sex theory, and whether Diet Coke is better than Coke Zero.
The madness was captured perfectly in an SNL skit Washington dreamin which America’s Founding Father explains that the real reason Americans needed freedom from the British was not to guarantee freedom, but to implement their own system of measurement and rules. Jean-Paul Sartre once said: “Freedom is what you do with what is done to you,” and America, after its liberation from Britain and other colonial powers, developed its own characteristics, among them the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a night in which the press and the White House ostensibly bury their differences in a few snapshots.
Usually, those shots are a joke, like Obama’s angry translator or Reagan’s call after an assassination attempt, but this year they came from the mouth of a deranged gunman who managed to bypass security.
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Washington Dream – SNL
The friendly Federal Hitman’s statement included apologies to all participants, had a list of targets, and even appended his complaints about poor security at the event. Naturally, Trump took the third attempt on his life as a sign of his importance in the American pantheon (just look at the names), and used it to promote his new (more secure and drone-proof) ballroom, but what exactly is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? How did that happen? Why are bosses expected to laugh at jokes made at their expense? And why, in a country that invented both the First Amendment and the AR-15 as competing forms of self-expression, does this annual dinner seem like the most American thing ever conceived? It begins, as many strange Washington rituals do, with journalists’ anxiety about access.
In 1914, White House reporters heard that President Woodrow Wilson’s administration might decide which reporters could ask the president questions. This was an unacceptable situation, and the White House Correspondents’ Association was born. It was never intended to be a celebrity gala, a scholarship fundraiser, a comedy gig, or a place for cable TV anchors to pretend to be unhappy while sitting next to the actors. It was created because reporters wanted to make sure that the White House did not decide who could question the White House, a labor union that had been promoted in terms of clothing. The first dinner occurred in 1921, and Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge became its first guest. This ritual quickly developed, with presidents enjoying sharp criticism at those who asked questions, and journalists pretending that their views mattered. The early dinners were boisterous and reflective of American democracy: cigars, songs, jokes, men deciding the fates of others, women conspicuous by their absence.
That changed with Helen Thomas pressing the issue and JFK refusing to attend unless the ban on women was lifted. It quickly became a true American tradition. C-SPAN showed it to the world. That dinner changed the way a camera changes everything. The private dinner was suddenly recast as a national show, and became more about access and optics.
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Clip: Translated President Obama’s Anger (C-SPAN)
The format settled into something oddly specific. The president speaks.
The comedian speaks. The room laughs, sometimes out of amusement, sometimes out of obligation, and sometimes out of the quiet realization that the joke isn’t really a joke but a better-timed statement. It is less a dinner than a carefully choreographed ritual in which the press and the presidency rehearse their relationship in public. That relationship was always strange. Journalism aims to question authority.
The president is supposed to bear this questioning. Dinner compresses this dynamic into an evening where question takes the form of humor and power responds with laughter. It’s accountability translated into entertainment, a system that only works if everyone agrees to the translation. For a long time, they did. Ronald Reagan understood the scene, even in his absence, calling him after an assassination attempt and reminding the room that American politics favors intelligence when it can afford it. Barack Obama has refined it into something akin to performance art, and never was that more evident than when he directed “The Rage Translator,” allowing calm public persona and imagined private frustration to coexist onstage.
It worked because it acknowledged the gap between what was said and what was meant, which is the whole business of politics, after all. Even the most intense moments followed the same internal logic. Stephen Colbert’s performance in 2006 made the room uncomfortable because it didn’t soften its edges, and Michelle Wolf’s set in 2018 did something similar in a different register. The reaction to both tells you something about Washington’s tolerance for sarcasm.
Dinner invites ridicule, but only within the recognizable bandwidth. Get out of it and the room will forget how to laugh. Recently, the ritual has continued in a familiar manner. A comedian like Colin Jost stands on stage, telling jokes about bosses, about ages, about the absurdity of the whole exercise, while the room does what it always does: laughs, winces, applauds, and moves on. It was truly American, like apple pie and its fattening, and made even more American by the presence of a gunman, a true tribute to America’s obsession with carrying weapons. In his first term, Trump refused to attend, which was considered un-American. And yet, in a strange and uncomfortable way, she now seems all-American. Because what is more American than this contradiction: a country that built the First Amendment as a shield for disagreement, and the AR-15 as a tool through which disagreement sometimes expresses itself? A dinner designed to turn hostility into humor is suddenly confronted by someone who refuses to translate and insists on speaking the original language of violence. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was supposed to be the civilized version of the conflict. The place where the president is mocked rather than attacked, where journalists ask questions rather than shout them, where the tension between authority and scrutiny is resolved, briefly, through laughter. But when someone decides that disagreement requires a trigger, not a sentence, the ritual doesn’t collapse so much as exposes its limits. Maybe that’s why the evening now seems more American than ever. Not because of the jokes, the presidents, or the celebrities, but because it contains, in one room, the full range of how the country expresses dissent, from the satirical to the spectacle to something far less obvious. A dinner where the powerful are supposed to be shot with jokes, and where someone seems determined to take this metaphor literally.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner now serves as a perfect metaphor for American democracy, celebrating the two things that are its bulwarks and hallmarks: freedom of speech and assault rifles.