Fittingly, the disgraceful second edition of the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) was celebrated in a venue that embodies Donald Trump’s corruption and impunity.

The ceremony was initially held in April at the Washington Hilton, but was interrupted by a failed assassination attempt. The second dinner took place on Friday at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, which from 2015 to 2022 was known as the Trump International Hotel Washington DC.

In Trump’s first term, the fact that the sitting president owned a hotel in the capital quickly led to recurring conflicts of interest: Many foreign dignitaries and political allies paid for the services of the hotel, a quick and easy way to curry favor. At least five people who received presidential pardons from Trump previously stayed at the hotel while the commander in chief owned it. Now, in his second term, Trump no longer owns the hotel—and, as the weekend’s nauseating spectacle showed, he probably wishes he still did.

The central event of the WHCD was a more-than-hour-long speech by Trump, during which he marveled at what he got away with when he owned the hotel. “I was very proud of this building,” Trump told the audience consisting mostly of journalists and White House staff. “This building was hot. Remember the lobby floor? 82,000 feet. For those in the real estate business, 82,000 feet. That’s a major, that’s a major floor. That thing was packed every single night. It was packed mostly Republicans, I would say, but it was packed every single night. It almost brings back memories.” Trump being Trump, he went on to a digression about the “beautiful chandeliers” at the hotel, which were “very special” and made from “Czech crystal.”

The throwaway comment about “mostly Republicans” filling the hotel would be damning if the United States were a country that took the constitutional prohibition against emoluments seriously. By acknowledging that the building was being used by political allies to enrich the president, Trump was displaying what jurists call mens rea, a guilty mind.

Luckily for Trump, he wasn’t speaking to a jury. He was speaking to a much friendlier crowd—the supposed crème de la crème of US political journalists. By all available evidence, they didn’t care. What does a little corruption matter, especially compared to the truly gargantuan graft of Trump’s second term?

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Not that the billions Trump has funneled into his personal coffers since returning to the White House mattered to the WHCD attendees either. If it did, they wouldn’t have shown up on Friday. And that tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

To be sure, the event has always been tawdry and cringe-worthy, even under presidents much less brazenly criminal than Trump. It’s a backslapping affair where the media that is supposed to hold the government accountable spends an evening making bad jokes while reveling in its proximity to power. Like the Al Smith dinner in New York, the WHCD is supposed to humanize the political system by showing that seemingly adversarial figures can come together for a good laugh. But in reality, these rituals of comity are also rituals of elite impunity—the whole point is to create an inner-circle bond through social ties that override any larger commitment to principle.

Last April, my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann made the case for getting rid of the WHCD altogether:

The phoned-in rationale for the whole thing has always been that it’s an opportunity to deepen the (already corrupt) practice of access journalism by permitting reporters and government sources to lay aside their structural divergence of interests for an evening and relish each other’s well-lubricated company. But for this alibi to hold water, someone somewhere should by now be able to point to a concrete scoop or productive thaw in press-government relations that issued from all the schmoozing. I’ve lived in Washington for a quarter century, and amid all the secrets, whisper campaigns, and speculations that propel DC journalism, I’ve never heard the faintest suggestion that the Correspondents’ Dinner served any useful newsgathering purpose.

Lehmann’s critique of the WHCD was more than vindicated by Friday night’s fiasco. The polymathic literary essayist Guy Davenport once wrote, “Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.” Anyone who listened to the soul-crushing attempted mirth of Trump’s WHCD speech was overcome by that same paralyzing suspicion.

Instead of humor, Trump resorted to racism and homophobia. He openly insulted his political foes and journalists in the crudest possible ways. He even crowed about the fact that his plutocratic friends now own the media and are in a position to punish journalists who criticize him.

Trump repeated rancid racist lies about Ilhan Omar, saying the Minnesota representative “and her brother are thinking about moving in together. Very much in love.” He added, “She ought to get the hell out of our country. She shouldn’t be here.” Trump complained that his advisers told him he shouldn’t call Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker “a fat pig.”

Trump made a bizarre sex joke and then berated the audience for not laughing:

The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife. And she said, “When you get home, I wanna have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.” And he said, “I can’t do both.” You know what the—ha ha. You know?

In other words, ha ha, can’t go up the stairs and make love. He, does anybody get that one? I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one. And that went down with not exactly great laughter.

Trump pretended to congratulate CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins on winning an award and then started to denigrate her. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump said. “It was all about me. It’s a fake—she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind, I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it.” Trump went on to conflate Collins with trans actress Dylan Mulvaney, which the transphobic president clearly meant as an insult.

Of all of Trump’s many failed jokes, the two most revealing involved allies who are helping to reshape the media to make it more friendly to the president: David Ellison, who runs CBS, and Bari Weiss, the faithful minion executing Ellison’s agenda. Trump’s comments about these two were pure exercises in humiliating the mainstream media.

About Ellison, Trump said:

But tonight’s event is even crazier than the last time.

In fact, it’s so successful that I’ve been informed by CBS News’s David Ellison, who’s gonna do a fantastic job. He’s the owner. He’s the owner. He bought it, spent a lot of money, and he’s gonna make, I think, fantastic changes and keep some of the great stuff going. But the next year, they’re going to call it the Trump White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

He told me that. And I like that very much. We’re gonna change the name of it, okay? Well, it’s gonna be so hot, just like our country is hot. We are hot, by the way. But to be honest, it’s just about the only way that they’re gonna ever get me back here. You’re gonna have to change the name of the dinner.

The joke about Weiss was premised on the fact that she’s married to a woman. Trump said:

I have to say that we’re having an amazing load of accomplishments that the media never talks about. For example, under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions.

But I, for one, wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News.

Although Trump has borrowed stylistically from comedians such as Don Rickles and Howard Stern, he doesn’t really do comedy. Rather, he indulges in insults, which mimic the effect of comedy by violating social norms. But the goal isn’t a laugh: It is humiliation. And in the case of the comments about Ellison and Weiss, the point was to underscore that Trump has powerful friends who can fire people at CBS (and possibly soon at CNN).

None of this is completely new. The types of comments Trump made at the WHCD are largely material Trump has used before in his MAGA rallies. But in this case, the audience wasn’t his MAGA fans but the media elite. By showing up to the WHCD, they have given Trump a venue to humiliate them. All of this was done in order to preserve access journalism and the rituals of elite civility. But Trump’s sheer, unmitigated cruelty had one redeeming quality: It made clear for all to see that elite civility is only empowering the decline of democracy.