The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an annual Catholic charity event in New York City, has traditionally been a place where the party's two leading presidential candidates threw lighthearted barbs at each other, while other public figures also digressed. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris left a recorded greeting so she could attend a campaign event in Wisconsin, leaving former President Donald Trump to deliver a profanity-laden speech alone to the white tie crowd on Thursday evening.
Trump, complaining about his legal troubles and throwing around transphobic cracks, lashed out at Harris (“I can't stand her”) and President Joe Biden (“President Biden couldn't be here tonight. The DNC made sure of that”). former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (“Crazy Nancy”) and others in comments that sounded more like grudge than joke. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who sat next to the podium, also drew fire, though Trump interrupted this part of the routine with seemingly half-hearted assurances that the New York senator was “a good man.”
Trump could have summed up his achievements in one sentence during his speech. “I don't care if this is a comedy or not,” he declared, before calling former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio a “terrible mayor” who “did a terrible job — that's not a comedy, by the way. , that's a fact.” He also warned the audience at the beginning of the speech about what was about to happen. “I have to tell a few self-deprecating jokes,” he told them. “So here goes… no. I have nothing. I have nothing!”
“I guess I just don't see the point in shooting at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a long time,” he added.
Many of Trump's jokes were based on old attack lines he used during his campaign, including Harris' laugh.
“But I have to say, I was shocked when I heard Kamala skipped the Al Smith dinner,” he said. “I was really hoping she would come because we can't get enough of hearing her beautiful laugh. She laughs like crazy. We would recognize it anywhere in this room.”
At times, Trump tried to take on two rivals at once. “We have someone in the White House who can barely speak, can barely put together two coherent sentences, who appears to have the mental faculties of a child, a person who has no intelligence whatsoever – but enough about Kamala Harris,” he said plainly insinuating that those same qualities applied to Biden as well.
Trump also took shots at the transgender community, suggesting that if Harris were to lose, Schumer could still become the first female president given “how woke” the Democratic Party has become. Schumer forced an awkward smile as Trump mocked him for looking so “gloomy,” the second time in a fake baby voice and accompanied by a back rub.
He also used transphobia to bash Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., Harris' running mate. “I used to think Democrats were crazy when they said men have periods, but then I met Tim Walz,” Trump said.
Not all of Trump's speech was about his enemies. He also set aside some time to compare himself to former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, following two recent assassination attempts on himself. “There has never been a president who has been treated as badly as I have been,” he lamented.
Although Trump was greeted with some laughter and applause (as well as gasps and boos) at the event itself, other people watching his performance were outspoken about their displeasure. The next morning, former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said on MSNBC that her husband, who teaches at a Catholic girls' school, called her in the middle of dinner about “what a buffoon and what a profane, blasphemous… laced hot mess that dinner was because he knows what that Catholic dinner should be.”
“This was someone who just acted terribly at that dinner and swore in front of the priests. Who does that?” Comstock added. 'That's just a terrible mess. We need to turn the page.”
According to Trump, it could have been much worse for them. “I was actually thinking about not making jokes tonight. I wanted to come out tonight and say, listen, this country is doing really bad. This isn't about jokes, but then someone said you have to make jokes,” concluded he.
