Schwab: Trump’s speech at correspondents’ dinner — nasty, brutish and long
Published 1:30 am Friday, July 31, 2026
With apologies to Thomas Hobbes, Trump’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was nasty, brutish, and long. It’s unsurprising that a man with no sense of humor, who can neither tell nor take a joke, who has empathy for none but himself, whose bitterness, mendacity, and self-pity characterize his entire life, resorted to unfunny, mean-spirited, crude, and childish insults at which no one laughed but his gaggle of incompophants. By acclamation, it was the most appallingly unpresidential speech since Andrew Johnson’s on September 4, 1866. The analyses are in. (https://tinyurl.com/2review4you)
Decent people were disgusted. MAGA loved it, the name-calling, body-shaming, transphobia, and lies. Trump hates everyone and everything they hate, and they love him for it. Their delight at the stench of his speech confirms it.
As to the dinner itself, given Trump’s Constitution-hating attacks on the free press, calling reporters enemies of the people, threatening arrests and delicensing, inviting him to speak was like having cancer over for dinner after it killed your best friend. One reporter refused to shake his hand. The rest, who didn’t, debased themselves. So did the planners who ended the tradition of having comedians roast the current president and the press. It was cowardice and capitulation akin to most Congressional Rs. Kudos to Wolf Blitzer, though, for reading the bill of particulars right next to Trump, including the doxxing of a reporter, leading to death threats, forcing her and her family to move. Trump, the personification of repugnance, literally laughed it off.
But there are greater outrages than useless dinners. We’re living under a government so corrupt, so dismissive of the intelligence of its people, that George Orwell would have burned his most famous book, had he concluded no one would believe such a dystopian world, like ours under Trump, could ever become real.
There’s no better (worse) example of Orwellian double-speak than removing the names of four soldiers killed in Iranian attacks from the list of eighteen war dead. Because those four were killed by strikes during one of many Trump-declared, imaginary ceasefires, they don’t count as deaths in war. So said straight-faced awficials. That malevolence came not from North Korea or Russia, but our own, minority-elected government. If he could, Trump would hide all the failures of his unnecessary war. Surely MAGA doesn’t buy it. Not even they are so thoroughly brainwashed, so delightedly uncritical that they accept such fetid bullscat as another justification for their limerence.
Mr. Orwell presaged Trump’s executive-ordered signs outside the Smithsonian Institution warning of “inaccurate information” therein (i.e., resisting the MAGAfication of our true history). In “1984,” George had the Ministry of Truth saying, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In real life, he wrote, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Like revealing that government officials doled out billions of dollars in grants for clean energy development to states “based solely” on whether they voted for Trump. Facts, pulled from a quicksand of lies, that should have led to actual revolution. Facts, like security problems with Qatairforce One, leading to Trump’s puppified DOJ subpoenaing New York Times reporters who revealed them. And their families. Trump’s lawyers abandoned that festival of unconstitutionality after a judge summarily firstamendmented them out of court. That acting Attorney General Todd Blanch issued those subpoenas shows why his nomination as permanent A.G. ought to be rejected 99-0 (absent not-necessarily-dead Mitch). Instead, his promotion will likely be approved, thanks to a Jello salad of devertebralated Republican senators.
Trump’s fact-free spewage includes, from now till November, accusing Democrats of being communists. Confident in the grateful gullibility of his voters and the fact that neither he nor they know the meaning of the word, he took a manly stand in defense of Mount Rushmore. “The communists want to take it down. They have tried to take Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up. They want to take it down…. These people are crazy.” If he believes that, he’s the crazy one. If he believes MAGA will believe it and that Congressional Republicans will look away from his confabulations, he’s right. But still crazy.
Crazier still are the rules his administration is pushing to complete his extinguishing of science, handing any hope of progress to the rest of the world, making his regressive, un-greatened America a fourth-world country. It limits creating research partnerships with other nations, the sort of cooperation that has led to major scientific breakthroughs. It would place in the hands of his unqualified, compliant political appointees, not experts, decisions on what kinds of research deserve funding, and how much. We can surmise which would get the axe, or, as Elon Musk’s death-dealing DOGE put it, the chainsaw: climate change, pollution, evolution, cosmology, vaccines, poverty, addiction, pure science like the Hadron Collider. And, by their exact words, “woke” and “DEI” things. (tinyurl.com/nocash4that)
But, hey, as long as Trump calls Adam Schiff a watermelon-head, it’s all good. Right, MAGA? Right? Are we great yet?
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
