The Waldorf Astoria where the gala dinner is held. | AP Photo/Mark Lennihan Guess who's coming to the Al Smith dinner

Every four years in late October, the presidential candidates of both major parties dust off their white tie and tails to take part in one of the great closing rituals of the long campaign: a gala dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in honor of a New York governor who gave voice to immigrants and city dwellers, who appointed women to high office at a time when men had a monopoly on power, and who demanded that his fellow American practice toleration and acceptance.

The governor was Alfred E. Smith, and his virtues are celebrated every year at the gala named in his honor. During most presidential campaigns since 1960, the two candidates for the nation’s highest office put aside their differences for a few hours to take part in the tribute. They are expected to exhibit a light-hearted wit in speaking of their opponent. They will have to laugh when the event’s master of ceremonies, Alfred E. Smith IV, pokes fun at their pretensions and foibles. And they will have to show some knowledge and appreciation of the role that Al Smith, the first Catholic to win a presidential nomination, played in creating a more tolerant nation.


This year figures to be very different.

One of the candidates whose name is featured on the invitation to Thursday’s gala, of course, will not be wearing white tie and tails.

But it's the other candidate whose presence will be more jarring. He denounces immigrants, believes cities are cesspools of violence and dysfunction, promotes women as sex objects, and regards intolerance as a sign of strength. His recent campaign rhetoric seems inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Al Smith dinner is yet another improvised explosive device waiting for Donald Trump to draw near. He still bears the wounds he suffered in 2011, when President Barack Obama and comedian Seth Myers took turns roasting him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Many people say the Trump candidacy was born that night, one man’s revenge on a nation that dared to laugh at him.

They will laugh at him again on Thursday night, and he will be expected to enjoy it. He will be sitting just a few feet away from Hillary Clinton, separated only by the affable presence of Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Al Smith IV surely will be gentler than Obama and Myers were back in 2011, and the audience will skew more conservative and, perhaps, less hostile.

But Trump will then have to cede the spotlight to his opponent, who, according to tradition, will have some well-meaning fun at his expense. (Tradition, however, does not dictate: In 1972, George McGovern and Spiro Agnew — filling in for Richard Nixon — were about as light-hearted as a Russian novel and nearly as long-winded. Some other election years, one or both of the candidates weren't invited at all.)

Trump will get his chance to be funny as well, but after the week he has had, it is entirely possible that the delights of dry, ironic humor may escape him. By the time he is called to the microphone, the wispy thatch that covers his scalp may well be ablaze with rage.

In some ways, the very idea of Trump attending a dinner in honor of Smith, a man slandered as dangerous because he worshiped God in ways the majority population found offensive and un-American because he lived in a place filled with foreigners, is absurd. There is likely nothing in Smith’s story that Trump finds interesting or inspiring, save that later in his life the former governor got rich, moved to a huge apartment on Fifth Avenue, and said some pretty nasty things about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But that is not the Al Smith who will be celebrated on Thursday night. Rather, the audience of wealthy Catholics and their friends, along with a multi-tiered dais filled with politicians and power brokers, will recall the grandchild of an Irish immigrant who left grade school to go to work to help his widowed mother and wound up as governor of New York when it was the most powerful state in the union. His is a story of determination, talent, ambition, luck, and no small amount of charm.

There has perhaps never been a presidential candidate at the Al Smith dinner more unlike Smith than Trump. Even the well-born and well-connected could at least claim within reason to understand and cherish some part of Al Smith’s story: the struggles of a young man working in the Fulton Fish Market before dawn to help pay the rent, the determination of an idealistic politician trying to make life a litter easier for families like his own, the disillusion of a decent man who saw the Ku Klux Klan’s crosses burning across the American heartland when he campaigned for president in 1928.

Yet there will be Trump, who one supposes would have dismissed Smith as a loser with a big nose and bad teeth.

While we can only speculate about what Trump would have said about Smith, we have a pretty good idea of what his father thought of him. The delightful Fred Trump was arrested during a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens in 1927 when he and some hooded gentlemen of his acquaintance wished to make it known that they considered power and privilege to be reserved for Protestants only. It was bad enough that New York had elected a Catholic governor and that Board of Aldermen was filled with Catholics and Jews. But the newspapers were saying that Smith might be nominated for president the following year. And this was too much for the bigots.

As they did whatever it is that Klansmen do when they gather in solidarity, they also circulated fliers lamenting that "Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language." The flier was recitation of grievances sounding very much like the sort of thing you will hear on cable programs hosted, sadly, by men named O’Reilly and Hannity, or lines delivered at a Trump rally as a new generation of embattled true Americans fights off another influx of foreigners.

Smith had an answer for this kind of aggression: Himself. He said his rosaries and marched in the St. Patrick’s Day parade and refused to soften his hard city edges. But he was as much a patriot as his native-born critics. More so, in fact, because he told scowling men and women that their loathing of people like him was a violation of the nation’s ideals. At a hostile venue in Oklahoma in 1928, in a speech that was broadcast around the country on radio, Smith declared that such hatred was un-American.

“I, as the candidate of the Democratic Party, owe it to the people of this country to discuss frankly and opening with them this attempt … to inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign which should be an intelligent debate of the important issues which confront the American people,” he said.

In the distance but within his line of sight, Klansman in hoods and sheets burned crosses to remind him that would not make many converts that night.

In his later years, Smith moved uptown to mingle with the high hats and swells, but for the most part he never forgot that he was a child of the Lower East Side who made good not only because he worked hard but because he was lucky, too. When a pretentious twit complained to him once about rabble from the city invading the pristine beaches of Long Island, he had a ready reply: “I’m the rabble.”

The elite descendants of the rabble will gather in the Waldorf on Thursday night, and they will no doubt accord the son of Fred Trump the respect and courtesy — the tolerance — that the elder Trump denied Al Smith and others like him.

It's not clear Trump possesses the capacity to respond in kind.