This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Even in a nation with a long and noble history of brutal comedy roasts, the performance of Michelle Wolf at the White House correspondents’ dinner put the cat among the social media pigeons.



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Twitter lit up on Saturday night and into Sunday with impassioned responses to the comic’s hyper-caustic japes at the expense of senior figures in the Trump administration. The annual event, traditionally conceived as a chance for government officials and reporters to let their hair down and poke fun at each other with some well-intentioned ribbing, descended into all-out acrimony.

At the center of the ruckus was White House press secretary Sarah Sanders who, sitting just feet away from the standup comic on the high table, was the butt of some of Wolf’s sharpest barbs.

The jokes, including references to Sanders lying during press briefings and to her facial makeup, provoked furious criticism from several current and former White House figures as well as prominent journalists.

Play Video 1:34 Who is comedian Michelle Wolf? – video

The roast prompted a walkout from White House adviser Mercedes Schlapp and her husband Matt Schlapp, who chairs the American Conservative Union. “Enough of elites mocking all of us,” he tweeted.

Enough of elites mocking all of us Matt Schlapp, American Conservative Union

Sean Spicer, Sanders’ predecessor as Trump’s press secretary, told the Guardian he thought Wolf’s speech was “absolutely disgusting”. Trump, who boycotted the dinner for a second year, was restrained by comparison, initially criticizing the event for being a “very big, boring bust … the so-called comedian really ‘bombed’.”

Several top political reporters agreed with the criticism from Republican politicians. That was in itself highly unusual, given the extreme estrangement of the press corps from a president who constantly berates them for what he calls “fake news”.

Andrea Mitchell of NBC News called for an apology for Wolf’s speech, which she said was the worst since Don Imus embarrassed the Clintons by making reference to Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs in an after-dinner address in 1996.

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Two New York Times reporters expressed distress. Maggie Haberman, who has written some of the most excoriating dispatches on the Trump White House and has been attacked for it by the president, leapt to Sanders’ defense, praising her for not walking out. Peter Baker, the Times’s chief White House correspondent, said: “I don’t think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight.”

Wolf – who told the Guardian in 2016 “four more years of Donald Trump jokes … will drive me insane” – answered Haberman on Twitter. “Hey mags!” she wrote. “All these jokes were about [Sanders’] despicable behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks though?”



She also claimed she had not been criticizing Sanders’ looks, writing: “I said she burns facts and uses the ash to create a *perfect* smoky eye. I complimented her eye makeup and her ingenuity of materials.”

The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), which organized the dinner, tried to assuage sore feelings.

All these jokes were about [Sanders’] despicable behavior Michelle Wolf

Margaret Talev, senior White House correspondent for Bloomberg, told CNN she “regretted” that the 15 minutes of Wolf’s speech “are now defining four hours of what was a really wonderful, unifying night. And I don’t want the cause of unity to be undercut.”



Later on Sunday, Talev issued a statement in which she said “the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit” of the WHCA, which aimed to “offer a unifying message”.

Trump stayed on the subject on Monday, tweeting: “The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is DEAD as we know it. This was a total disaster and an embarrassment to our great Country and all that it stands for. FAKE NEWS is alive and well and beautifully represented on Saturday night!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Sanders, in blue, listens to Michelle Wolf. Photograph: Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

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From the other direction, there was a mass of comment defending Wolf’s first amendment right to speak as she saw fit and decrying the inability of so many people to take a joke. The actor and comedian Rosie O’Donnell, one of Trump’s betes noires, slammed those who called Wolf’s speech vulgar by replying: “It’s a roast – truth telling is required.”

The comedian Kathy Griffin, who was at the dinner, ridiculed those who said Sanders should not have been subjected to such disrespect: “Sarah was there representing Trump, on the dais, at an event with a professional comic who was hired to do a roast.”

Griffin knows a thing or two about the price comics can pay when they are deemed to have crossed a line. When she posted a photo of herself last year carrying a model of Trump’s severed head, she was widely denounced and shunned.

The continuing furore over the dinner was, in the last analysis, thoroughly Trumpian. A few years ago, when Barack Obama was in the Oval Office, the White House correspondents’ dinner was criticized for being a cosy club.

How times have changed.