This past weekend, the White House Correspondents Dinner was held in Washington, DC. At the dinner, so-called “comedian” Michelle Wolf took full advantage of her fifteen minutes in the spotlight. Wolf showered the assembled audience of DC elite with twenty minutes of sludgy, unfunny non-jokes, all delivered in a high-pitched, screechy voice which lacked even the most rudimentary aspects of the comedian’s craft.
Through the whole twenty minutes of her presentation, Wolf made only two or three jokes that had any comedic value. (A joke about Mitch McConnell’s neck skin was perhaps the funniest in the whole routine, which shows how low the bar was for the evening.) The rest of her time was spent in vile insults and profane rambling. Wolf seemed to lack any kind of energy, as if it were an unpleasant chore to be asked to address and entertain the assembled media elite of America. (Which, of course, it probably was.)
Besides the frequent references to Trump as a “pussy grabber” and Mike Pence as a “little weirdo,” Wolf also took aim at Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, both of whom were in the room.
Wolf joked that she hoped Conway would be “trapped under a tree”, and called Sanders a “liar” and the “white female equivalent of an Uncle Tom.” Sanders, who was seated at the podium only a few feet away from Wolf, weathered the insults with commendable grace, though she was clearly hurt by the vulgar comedian’s unfair attacks.
The entire unfunny affair was met with only sporadic laughter, because Wolf targeted the leftward media with a number of offensive zingers as well. Wolf insinuated that the mainstream media is struggling in its opposition to Trump because of its one-note, uninspired, and consistently biased coverage.
Finally, at the end of her poorly-delivered and unfunny routine, she castigated the assembled media elites for their role in the rise of Trump, blaming them for profiting off of his headline-dominating behavior. (This was perhaps the only valid political point made in her twenty-minute long speech.) The discomfort of the crooked media personalities was palpable, and understandably so.
Because even though she was biased and her jokes seemed purposefully lazy, Michelle Wolf was right about one thing: the dishonest liberal media has tried, with their biased coverage of President Trump, to make money off of him from the very beginning.
President Trump is the leftist media’s bread and butter, and his behavior is paying their salaries. If he weren’t in office, they would have nothing to feign outrage over. The rise of Trump has given the liberal elite a constant source of news.
But the media no longer exists to report the news; now, they work to influence it. They exist to create news by soliciting a reaction from the President. By putting him on the defensive and driving many potentially-damaging narratives about his behavior, they give themselves more material to write about and more decisions to criticize. They now exist not as observers of the political cycle, but as participants in it.
The media have now moved fully into their role as Trump’s main political opponents. They oppose his actions and decisions and sling dirt at him and his contemporaries without even the pretense of fairness.
