The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an annual Catholic charity event in New York City, has traditionally been a place for the two major party presidential nominees to throw lighthearted barbs at each other, with other public figures also catching strays. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris left a recorded greeting so that she could attend a campaign event in Wisconsin, leaving former President Donald Trump to deliver a profanity-laden speech on his own to the white-tie audience Thursday evening.
Trump, complaining about his legal troubles and tossing around transphobic cracks, lashed out at Harris ("I can't stand her"), President Joe Biden ("President Biden couldn’t be here tonight. The DNC made sure of that"), former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ("Crazy Nancy") and others in remarks that appeared to resemble grievance more than jest. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was seated next to the podium, also received fire, though Trump punctuated this part of the routine with seemingly half-hearted assurances that the New York senator was "a good man."
Trump might have encapsulated his performance in one sentence during his speech. “I don’t give a s**t if this is comedy or not,” he declared, before calling former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio a "terrible mayor" who did a "horrible job — that's not comedy, by the way, that's a fact." He did warn the attendees of what was to come at the beginning of the speech, too. “I’m supposed to tell a few self-deprecating jokes,” he told them. “So here it goes... nope. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing!”
“I guess I just do not see the point in taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a long time," he added.
Many of Trump's jokes relied on the old lines of attack he has used on the campaign trail, including Harris' laugh.
“But I must say, I was shocked when I heard that Kamala was skipping the Al Smith dinner,” he said. “I’d really hoped that she would come, because we can’t get enough of hearing her beautiful laugh. She laughs like crazy. We would recognize it anyplace in this room.”
At times, Trump sought to take on two rivals at once. “We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child, is a person that has no intelligence whatsoever — but enough about Kamala Harris,” he said, clearly insinuating that those same qualities applied to Biden as well.
Trump also took shots at the transgender community, suggesting that if Harris lost, Schumer could still become the first woman president given "how woke" the Democratic Party has become. Schumer forced an uncomfortable smile as Trump mocked him for looking so "glum," the second time in a fake-baby voice and accompanied by a back-rub.
He also used transphobia to batter Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., Harris' running mate. “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying men have periods, but then I met Tim Walz,” Trump said.
Not all of Trump's speech was about his enemies. He also reserved some time to compare himself to former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson in wake of two recent assassination attempts against himself. “There’s never been a president that has been treated so badly as me,” he complained.
Though Trump was greeted with some laughter and applause (but also gasps and boos) at the event itself, other people who watched his performance were outspoken with their displeasure. The next morning, former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., told CNN's Kasie Hunt that her husband, who teaches at a Catholic girls school, called her at the middle of the dinner about "what a buffoon and what an ungodly, profanity-laced hot mess that dinner was, because he knows what that Catholic dinner is supposed to be."
"This was somebody who was just being horrendous at that dinner, swearing in front of priests – who does that?" Comstock added. "That is just a hot, horrible mess. We need to turn the page."
According to Trump, it could have been a lot worse for them. "I actually thought about not doing jokes tonight, I was going to come out tonight and say listen, this country is doing really badly, this is not about jokes, but then some person said you have to do jokes," he concluded.
