The evidence continues to mount: There is nothing in the world that Donald Trump can’t make worse.

Our latest example is the Al Smith Dinner, a feel-good annual event at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, in which the political and business elite gather to congratulate themselves for raising money to help poor children. It’s sponsored by the Catholic archdiocese, and in presidential election years it’s a tradition for the candidates to show up and make witty, self-deprecatory speeches in which each can also take gentle gibes at the other.

The nation is filled with must-show events for politicians. (There was quite a stir in Florida a few years ago when the gubernatorial candidates failed to attend the Wausau Possum Festival.) But few are as high-end and theoretically bipartisan as the Smith dinner. The most important guests are seated in tiers onstage, where hoi polloi can admire their table manners.

The first time I attended was back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were the star attractions. It was one of my very first assignments as a New York reporter. More prominent people covered the speeches; my job was to watch the stage and make sure the famous developer-power broker Robert Moses, who was in his 90s, made it through the meal. Moses kept sort of nodding off, his head dipping toward his soup. But my scoop never came.

There was one moment of excitement when Jimmy Carter tried to tell a sassy joke. He warned people to avoid getting too close to Reagan’s “I Love New York” button because “the paint is still wet.” The crowd cried out, shocked that the president had gone over the good-manners line. You get the idea. This thing has been going on since 1945 without major incident, and it took Donald Trump to screw it up.