White House Correspondents Dinner

Trump Tweets Michelle Wolf “Bombed” as Debate Over White House Correspondents’ Dinner Turns into a Twitter Sinkhole

Wolf did not hold back in her jokes about the media, Trump, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
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Michelle Wolf drew criticism from the usual sides after her stand-up routine at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where she threw jabs at Donald Trump, Fox News, and Mike Pence. Wolf’s jokes about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was in attendance, drew the most criticism from conservatives. “I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you know?” Wolf said. “Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders? What’s Uncle Tom, but for white women who disappoint other white women?” She likened Sanders to The Handmaid’s Tale’s evil Aunt Lydia, played by Ann Dowd, and said she uses the ash from all the facts she burns “to create the perfect smoky eye. It’s, like, maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s lies.”

For the second year in a row, the dinner was absent major Hollywood wattage, as many of the celebrities who had journeyed to the event during the Obama years sat out. Among the non-Washington-based attendees were comedians Jordan Klepper of Comedy Central’s The Opposition and Kathy Griffin, who is resurrecting her career after the fallout from her photo shoot with a bloodied replica of Trump’s severed head.

Wolf’s performance, in particular the Sanders material, sparked outrage from the conservative class, and left some in the Washington media questioning the event’s decorum. From there, the episode proceeded, predictably, along normal Twitter sinkhole lines of reactions—and reactions to the reactions.

Trump, who held a rally in Washington, Michigan instead, tweeted Sunday morning that Wolf had “bombed,“ and that the dinner was a “very big, boring bust.”

Speaking on CNN on Sunday morning, White House Correspondents’ Association president Margaret Talev, a Bloomberg correspondent, said of Wolf’s set that “my only regret is that, to some extent, those 15 minutes are now defining four hours of what was a really wonderful, unifying night.” Axios, the daily Arlington-based thought-leader class tip sheet, called Wolf’s performance a “big, embarrassing win” for Trump. The New York TimesMaggie Haberman tweeted that she was impressed by how Sanders “sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out.” (That Trump publicly is the most indecorous president in contemporary history was not lost on some observers.)

Wolf, who has a Netflix series premiering next month, responded to Haberman, saying that all of her jokes about Sanders were about her “despicable behavior,” not the way she looked.

Wolf also thanked Sean Spicer for calling the dinner “a disgrace.”