«Do you know the one that I gave?». The unforgettable lead with which the comedian Eugenio began his jokes in the eighties and nineties is perfectly applicable to the correspondents’ dinner that Joe Biden presided over at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night (early yesterday morning in Spain). A traditional act in the history of the White House that for the last three years had been turned off by the coronavirus pandemic and that received the president as a recent candidate for re-election, in the electoral race that will take place next year.
“You may think that I don’t like Rupert Murdoch. That is not true. How can I not like someone who makes me look like Harry Styles?” The first ‘do you know the one I gave?’ of the president during the banquet delighted the guests. Murdoch just turned 92 years old. Biden is 80 and last night he decided to face them before a media outlet that constantly reports the reluctance of the Americans for someone of this age to face another four years of presidency.
“I understand that age is something completely reasonable,” he admitted to journalists to, immediately, point out: “You say that I am old, I say that I am wise.” He returned to the subject several times. Like when he extolled the 1791 amendment to the Constitution protecting free speech and referred to its author, James Madison, as “a friend.”
References to the Fox network and its recent turmoil also abounded, especially the dismissal of its announcer Tucker Carlson, a reference to the most aggressive Trumpism, and the agreement with the electoral measurement company Dominion, which obliges the communication company to pay him something more than 700 million euros for defamation in relation to false allegations of fraud in the 2020 elections. The Fox journalists “are here because they couldn’t say no to a free meal,” Biden joked while comedian Roy Wood Jr ., invited to the rostrum, threw a cape on him by noting that after Carlson’s firing “millions of Americans will be left without knowing why they hate Trump.”
The White House Correspondents Association event was attended by 2,600 guests. What was less, as usual, were correspondents and journalists who cover the political information of the Administration. On the other hand, businessmen, editors, publicists, VIPs and movie, music and sports stars abounded (John Legend, Liev Schreiber, Enes Freedom and Brittney Griner, the WNBA player detained in Russia and released last December in a prisoner exchange). Also in attendance were senior politicians such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schummer, and the endearing figure of former White House health adviser Anthony Fauci. At the beginning of this legislature, the octogenarian ‘covid czar’ decided to leave his official position to pursue his passion for research.
Even the actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sent a recorded message praising the journalistic profession. All this, very celebrated. ‘Arnie’, endowed with great closeness and sympathy behind a mountain of muscles, is part of the tableau of leaders halfway between politics and Hollywood that Ronald Reagan premiered, but with a feeling of friendly neighborliness that he never showed.
It was therefore a vast gallery of characters that was not unusual at a dinner that throughout its numerous editions has recorded the presence of Bob Hope. Ozzy Osbourne, Jay Leno, the couple formed by Demi Moore and Ashton Tucker, the Kardashians, Ellen Degeneres (recently out of the closet and who ended up kissing her partner Anne Hache in front of Bill Clinton) and Barbra Streisand, who had a long talk with Colonel Colin Powell on homosexuality in the military. Very uninhibited, George W. Bush took the stage with comedian Steve Bridges, portrayed as the Republican leader, at the 2006 banquet. Clinton also had his own ‘copy’ of him and was even forced to overcome his embarrassment and play the safoxon. .
The ‘celebrities’ of Clinton and Obama
The tradition of the dinner was established in 1924. For many years it was a semi-formal act of rapprochement between the Government and the press. Even small films and documentaries were shown. As the years progressed, it began to take on a more social tone, which emerged during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, prone to surround themselves with Hollywood stars, singers and fashionable social figures. Both turned the ritual with the press into a ‘cool’ catwalk. There were also compromising situations. Journalist Michael Kelly attended in 1987 and 1988 with Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s National Security Council secretary who helped destroy compromising Irangate documents, and Donna Rice, whose affair with Gary Hart ruined the presidential race of the promising Democrat.
The presence of ‘celebrities’, however, vanished during the tenure of Donald Trump. The posh guests preferred not to be photographed with him. This circumstance contributed to the decline of a banquet that the Republican leader himself refused to attend on two occasions, while on a third time he prevented comedians from being on the stage. If anyone had to speak at the presidential dinner, it was him.
Some sources maintain that the resentment of this tradition of the tycoon began in 2011. Then he was a popular character for his program ‘The Apprentice’ and for sowing doubts about Obama’s American roots. So that night he became the butt of the African-American president’s jokes, who even displayed his birth certificate. “No one is happier to put an end to this birth certificate thing than Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell?” Obama quipped.
This last Saturday the anti-republican irony was not lacking either. Biden represented himself at the Washington Hilton as Dark Brandon, a fictional character emerged from his detractors in 2021, who used to chant “Fuck Joe Biden” in public and was mistaken by a TV host for the chant “Let’s go Brandon”. in relation to a popular American pilot. From that moment on, the right multiplied memes about an alter ego of the president called Dark Brandon, a sinister type of the dark internet, who, however, the Democrats have brought to his ground.
The hero of the black glasses
Brandon is today a hero with the face of Biden and the lightning bolt gaze of Superman that fills all the merchandising of the White House tenant, from mugs to T-shirts, and that the interested party himself has included in his electoral application. Last night, in the image of his alter ego, Biden donned his black aviator glasses in front of the press, the same ones that stop Brandon’s ability to shoot lightning with his eyes. By the way, they endowed him with an amazing resemblance to the late editor Stan Lee, legendary creator of Marvel characters such as Spiderman or The Fantastic Four.
Elon Musk tweeted that NPR (the US public broadcasting service) should be defunded. The best way to make NPR go away is for Elon to buy it.”
The Biden jokes continued into a pleasant evening. He and his wife, Jill Biden, thus renewed their adherence to an essential act on Washington’s political agenda, which, however, the coronavirus quarantined coinciding with the first years of his term. In fact, the couple skipped dinner in 2022 and went only to the part of the speech as a preventive measure. Then it turned out that numerous guests ended up with covid, probably because they had spent the whole night with some carriers in a room with poor ventilation.
But it has also brought the president closer to journalists, since he is among the US leaders who least lavishes himself on press conferences or interviews; a trend that, however, has progressively changed since the war in Ukraine and, now, with his electoral candidacy.
“I had a lot of Ron DeSantis jokes ready, but Mickey Mouse beat the crap out of me and got to them first.”
Biden met his quota of criticism of Republicanism last night. He joked about the lawsuit between the governor of Florida and the Disney corporation. But he got serious when referring to Trump. Faced with the anger unleashed by the magnate towards the media, Biden sentenced: “The free press is a pillar, perhaps the pillar of a free society, it is not a criminal.”
Amid the respectful silence in the room, the president recalled two journalists: Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent for the ‘Wall Street Journal’ in Moscow detained by the Russian authorities on charges of espionage, and photojournalist Austin Tice, kidnapped in 2012 when he was going to cover a story in Syria. The last images of the reporter belong to a video where he appears blindfolded surrounded by a group of men armed with rifles and a grenade launcher. His family is convinced that the Syrian authorities ordered his capture.
“I am working every day to bring them home. As a nation we must never give up hope that things can change,” Biden said, before addressing the families of the two journalists, present in the room. “Please keep the faith,” Biden told them. The time for jokes had already passed.
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