The NPR Politics Podcast - Comedian Responds To Criticism After Controversial Remarks At The White House Correspondents' Dinner

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

President Trump's absence was the least controversial part of this year's White House Correspondents' dinner. Instead it was the crude jokes made by the event's headliner. The criticism has prompted questions about the purpose of the annual gala. Plus, Trump has till midnight to yet again prevent a brewing trade war. This episode: host/Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson and political reporter Asma Khalid. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi team, this is Alyssa calling from Raleigh, North Carolina, where I'm getting ready to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins take on the Philadelphia Flyers in the first round of the playoffs. Or as some who listen to this podcast may refer to the rivalry as Sheets vs. Wawa. This podcast was recorded at... Sheets won that one. It's at 2.33 Eastern on April 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, at NPR.org, the NPR One app, or on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Let's go, Pens!

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with a quick take on the White House Correspondents Dinner. Yep, that dinner. Good evening, good evening. Here we are, the White House Correspondents Dinner. Michelle Wolf's roast of the Trump administration and the media has gotten a little bit of praise, a lot of criticism, and a couple tweets from the president. Enough people are still talking about it that we're going to talk about it right now. I'm here to make jokes. I have no agenda. I'm not trying to get anything accomplished.

So everyone that's here from Congress, you should feel right at home. Most of this conversation is focused on jokes that Wolf made about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her looks. Wolf sat down with Terry Gross from WHYY's Fresh Air to defend herself. I think they didn't pay attention to what was said. Also, we are facing a big deadline. At midnight tonight, President Trump's tariff exemptions expire, and the president has yet to make up his mind about whether or not he'll continue to cut U.S. allies a break from those new tariffs on steel and aluminum. If he doesn't, there could be big global consequences. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

And I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. So, hey, guys, how have the last few weeks of your life been? Well, we are not with a newborn. Exactly. Sleep deprived nights. Nope, that's not me. I just have to use up first for my sleep. Yeah. Luckily, up first and covering elections gives you a lot of training in that environment. So let's start with that, because I was spending my Saturday night with a baby on my belly watching baseball. And I check Twitter late in the night and I see Twitter is a forest fire of outrage.

Everyone in political Twitter is angry and they are yelling about the White House correspondence dinner. And I didn't even know where to start. Mara, you were there. Why is everybody so upset? Wait a minute. Everybody is not upset. Okay. Many people are upset for completely different reasons. Yes. Because everything now in the political era we are in makes everybody upset for different reasons. Okay. This time, it was a raunchy, foul-mouthed comedian. We've had many of those in the past at these dinners. But the president wasn't there. He was at a rally in Michigan, excoriating the press, as he usually does.

Is this better than that phony Washington White House correspondence? Is this more fun? And whipping the crowd into a frenzy about how horrible we are. Meanwhile, unlike last year, White House staff did attend the dinner. And many people thought that the comedian went over the line. And this is Michelle Wolfe. Let's listen to a couple of the jokes that have really risen to the top of the souffle-o-Twitter outrage. I actually really like Sarah. I think she's very resourceful. Like, she burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye.

Like, maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's lies. It's probably lies. And I'm never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know, is it Sarah Sanders? Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Is it Cousin Huckabee? Is it Auntie Huckabee Sanders? Like, what's Uncle Tom but for

white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know, Aunt Coulter. See, that to me wasn't all that hysterically funny. And also the smoky eye thing is pretty obscure. That's a standard makeup technique. That doesn't sound like an insult. The rest of it certainly did, calling her a liar, although that's been done before.

I can just say personally, there were also jokes about abortion. There was a lot of profanity. I felt just as uncomfortable sitting there as I do when I hear Donald Trump insult minorities, talk about women's looks, make fun of a disabled reporter. I mean, it was very, very similar. Asma, there was a lot of conversation and anger about the jokes themselves in a vacuum and the White House correspondents there in a vacuum. But then there was a lot of whole other response saying, well, wait a second. President Trump says this type of stuff all of the time. I mean, you're right, Scott. And I do think there was a lot of that, you know, sort of what what about what about ism?

Is that the right word? What about ism? What about ism? There we go. There was a lot of that whataboutism, you know, on both sides or either side. Both sides is even not the right word, but on all sides of this conversation. Because, you know, look, it was crude. And I didn't think the comedy routine was particularly funny.

I'm a bit of a prude, maybe you could say. So that's not really like my cup of tea. But beyond that, I would say, you know, to Mara's point, I think a lot of people who've covered the president in any capacity, if they've ever been to a Donald Trump rally, even during his campaign, were pointing to the fact that the president has used oftentimes just as crude language. And I saw some of that conversation. You're right on Twitter. I mean, and I think what was to me sort of remarkable was the conversation happening in different sort of pockets of Twitter. There was this conversation among black and brown folks that felt somewhat distinct. In fact, there's a reporter from The Root who last night tweeted out and asked,

have any black journalists complained about Michelle West's performance? I mean, I haven't seen one yet. That's what he asked. It was like to to reference the number one movie in America right now. It was like an infinity stone gauntlet of different types of Twitter outrage. You had you had liberal whataboutism. You had conservative whataboutism. You had members of the Trump administration who marched out of the dinner, some of whom we should point out happened to go to the after party. Anyway, you had people saying this is sexism, like all of the isms were covered in the response. Let's listen to what Michelle Wolf had to say in response,

because she actually sat down with Terry Gross of Fresh Air for an interview that's going to air on Tuesday and talked about her response. So let's listen to a little bit of that. I'm more surprised on what they're focusing on, rather, because I think I said more controversial things than the actual jokes that they're focusing on. What do you think was more controversial? Well, I think they're kind of just trying to distract from the ending, which where I pointed out that they're all profiting off of Trump and they helped create this monster. By that you mean the media? The media, yes. Because you say something like the

media created Trump and now you're all profiting from him. Yes. Yeah. And I think they don't want to focus on that part. I would say there were probably about 1,500 symposia starting the day after the election about the media's role in Donald Trump's rise. But the thing that's so fraught about this moment is that the White House Correspondents' Dinner is hypocrisy incarnate. It doesn't know what it is. And is it a chance for White House correspondents to schmooze with the people they cover? It's just a kind of posteriorial osculation fest. If that's the case, then maybe you shouldn't have a comedian roasting the president if you really are just trying to curry favor with the people you cover. On the other

hand, maybe it's a celebration of the First Amendment, in which case you could have it go in all sorts of different directions. But the White House Correspondents Dinner doesn't really know what it is or should be in the age of Trump. And the other thing I want to point out is that this kind of comedy you can find by turning on your television after 11 o'clock almost every night of the week. What's unusual is when the president of the United States acts like an insult comic and when the White House press secretary often over and over again explains some outrageous thing that the president has said or an inaccurate thing by saying he was just joking. That's their defense. He was just being a comedian. Well, let's talk about the weirdness of the dinner for a

second, because it is very weird. I have not been to it. Asma, have you ever gone? I've never been, but Mara, you were there. I've been there 29 times. I probably starting when I was 10. I didn't go last year, so I didn't see the first attempt at dealing with the age of Trump. There was a comedian. He wasn't there. White House staffers weren't there this year. He didn't come because he does his usual counter-programming to use the presses of foil to rail against us. But he did allow his staff to come, which was kind of unusual. So, Mara, let's listen to something else that Michelle Wolf said to Terry Gross. And I want your response as a longtime veteran of this dinner to just the overall weirdness of it. The overarching thing that people kept telling me is that they were like, it's a bad room.

In what sense? In that it just like, they were like, nothing ever sounds good in that room. Because? A couple different factors. I mean, it's a large ballroom. The audience isn't mic'd, so you can't, the laughs aren't very audible in general. But it's also, it's formal, which people don't laugh as much when they're dressed up. There's round tables and people are eating or drinking.

So by the virtue of a round table table people are partially turned away from you and it's televised there are all these people that may or may not be able to show genuine reactions and so if you're you're constantly thinking i need to react in a way that is uh will come off well on tv i mean like like not seem partisan? Right, yeah. That you might not be giving a genuine reaction to what's being said. You're saying some people might be afraid to laugh because it'll make them look partisan? Make them look partisan or make them look like they're laughing at someone they shouldn't be laughing at. Right.

That sounds like a lot of, there's an explanation but not an excuse. I mean, first of all, the other thing that the White House Correspondents Dinner lacks in its ongoing identity crisis is any kind of a guidelines or guidance about what that roast, what that comedic part is supposed to be. I also go to the gridiron. The gridiron has a rule singe, but do not burn. There are hysterically funny takedowns of the go to the gridiron. The gridiron has a rule, singe but do not burn. There are hysterically funny takedowns of the president at the gridiron that are eviscerating, but they're never mean. Mara, real quick, what is the gridiron? Real quick. It's an ancient society of journalists, and it puts on a funny skit,

and it invites the members of Congress, the president, et cetera, to deliver funny, humorous speeches, lampooning each other and themselves. And it's been going on since the late 1800s. And isn't the dress even fancier for the gridiron? The dress is white tie, which doesn't make a darn bit of difference for women. But it does mean that men have to wear a different monkey suit. Well, that's a big difference for guys because we only really have two levels of fancy, you know, normal suit, tuxedo. Just go to the rental place. But why do we even have this thing and why do we pay so much attention to it?

Because like in Washington, there's this like this never ending parade of long, terrible dinners. There is no good reason why we pay so much attention to it. There is not a single good reason. Look. Well, tune in tomorrow. Yes, tune in tomorrow. Because look how much other important stuff was happening. The president of the United States, not only was he giving some of his usual harangue against his favorite enemies and foils in Michigan, but he also made a comment there that if he doesn't get the appropriate

border security bill, that he would, quote, shut down the country in September. I think he meant shut down the government, but that's kind of significant. The other thing that there's so many, you know, the White House Correspondents Association is going to do a lot of thinking about this and they're going to think about whether they should have a comedian. Should they have a conservative and a liberal comedian? The other thing they could have done, what if they had just taken the speech that Donald Trump gave because he gave it before Michelle Wolf got up to speak and just aired it. It was like Donald Trump's prebuttal. Asma, we have talked so much about how President Trump thrives on culture wars. The best recent

example since he's taken office is the over and over again returning to this issue of NFL players kneeling and riling people up that way. This seems like Taylor made for something for Trump to tee off on the press on. Steve Bannon has talked about how the press is the enemy of his administration. And here you have a bunch of reporters hanging out with a bunch of famous people in tuxedos in a ballroom listening to a comedian be mean to the Trump administration. Like, like you couldn't better orchestrate something for Trump and Trump allies to kind of tee off on. I mean, I think you're exactly right. It does kind of fit right into the narrative that he's already described and his justification for not attending the dinners. But what is kind of

remarkable is given the sort of public Twitter outrage, the president himself has not been sort of, you know, like beating the drum about his disgust about this. I think he had a tweet out last night. He had a tweet out this morning saying that the White House Correspondents Dinner is dead, right? It's a disaster, an embarrassment. But it's not like he's been prolific on Twitter to the degree that he sometimes is when various culture war issues kind of get under his skin. Asma, you're not in Washington right now. I'm not. Do you think this is something that people who don't live here care about?

Gosh. You know, look, stories like this, they're Twitter bait, right? They get a lot of clicks online because anything about Donald Trump, for the same reason that, you know, when he says something outrageous, it also gains a lot of traction. So it's hard for, I think, folks to compute always that like these things are popular in the sort of like celebrity infotainment realm. But in the actual real life implications of anything, no, I don't think it matters at all. I'm prepping for a trip to Georgia.

I've been making phone calls calls talking to Republicans this morning. Not one person brought up the White House Correspondents Dinner. But you know, when the White House Correspondents Dinner did really matter, nobody seemed to notice it at the time. But in 2011, this is right after the end of the saga of Donald Trump demanding to see President Obama's birth certificate, insinuating Obama was not born in America. Of course, Obama was born in America. Shortly before the dinner, Obama releases his birth certificate, proceeds to just roast, eviscerate Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents Dinner, humiliates Donald Trump. There has been a lot of reporting that that was kind of like an origin story moment where Donald Trump just seethed and seethed and said, you know what, I'm going to

take on the Washington establishment. Mara, do you- You know what, that's part of the Donald, that's the chopping down the cherry tree of Donald Trump. There's no doubt about it. I cannot tell a lie, said George Washington. The problem is that Donald Trump had already run for president before for a brief moment, I think, I can't remember, on the reform party. I mean, Donald Trump has been looking into a run for president before for a brief moment. I think I can't remember on the Reform Party. I mean, Donald Trump has been looking into a run for president since the late 80s. It's a good cinematic. It's a good cinematic. It's like chopping down the cherry tree story.

Yeah, I don't buy it. OK, I think we have talked about this quite enough. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about a big deadline that President Trump is facing midnight tonight, whether or not he's going to extend tariff protections. Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers from Embedded. Bill Spencer works at a coal mine in Kentucky. And when I start to ask him about a future without coal, he knows what I'm going to say. So if coal goes out, I'm done for. Coal Stories on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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straight to you in days. Get 15% off your first order at FrameBridge.com with promo code NPR. All right, we're back. So, Mara, we have been talking for months about steel and aluminum tariffs, how they could shake up the global economy. What is happening today that's new and different? What's new and different, or maybe it's not so new and different, is we're waiting for the president to make a decision. And at least the last time I checked, nobody knew what decision he was going to make. So that's not so new and different. He has to decide whether at midnight

tonight to put the tariffs that he promised on steel producers around the world, including many of our allies. He gave a bunch of them an exemption until May 1st. He has already given a permanent exemption to South Korea, and he never gave any exemption at all to Japan. But the point is that if he does that, the EU and other of our allies have said they would retaliate with tariffs of their own on very carefully chosen American products like Kentucky bourbon or Harley-Davidson's, which are made in Wisconsin near Paul Ryan's district. And then you could have, if it escalates, a trade war. That's why this is significant. And Asma, that trade war that everyone had been

worried about so far has not come to pass, mostly because of these broad exemptions. But there has been a lot of analysis that if suddenly you have this tit for tat escalation, that could really affect the global economy. Yeah, exactly. But I don't know that you really ever know you're in a trade war until you're actually in the midst of a trade war, right? And so I think that everyone's kind of prognosticating about what it could mean, because these are pretty hefty tariffs. It's 25% on steel, and I believe it's 10% on aluminum, which is, you know, fairly sizable. I've been doing some kind of pre-interviews with folks both in Indiana and Ohio who work in the steel industry. And I was talking with a guy in Indiana the other day, he's a Democrat. You know, he thought that initially these tariffs would be good for him,

good for the local economy. But he sort of has been a bit of a, I would say, skeptical because the sheer nature of the number of exemptions doesn't really help them out. I mean, what's a real sort of tariff if you start giving exemption to the EU, to Brazil, to South Korea, you know, then what are you left with? Essentially, just China, Japan and Russia that are not exempted. Well, that's the whole idea. If you're really trying to go after China as the bad actor, then you want to only put tariffs on them, as presidents in the past have done. But you know, what Osma brings up is a really important point, a Democrat in the Midwest. The people who have been applauding Donald Trump's threatened tariffs are generally Rust Belt Democrats like Sherrod Brown.

And this is the first time in his entire administration that he has gotten actual pushback on a policy from Republicans in Congress. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and many other Republicans have actually spoken out against these tariffs. Usually they just bite their tongue and go along with whatever he does. But this was the one exception. So the way that the tariff storyline has played out fits into a broader pattern, though, right, where it starts out with this big, dramatic threat from the White House. And then the actual policy that emerges is a lot more watered down than the initial threat. And then there's this cliffhanger moment where we're in right now where you wait to see what's going to go into effect.

Is it the bluster or is it the policy that came out a couple of weeks later? I mean, how many times have we been here? But to play devil's advocate a bit here, Scott, I would make the argument that even if, you know, the EU, say Brazil, a range of countries are given exemptions. If that's the case, and really it holds that the countries that do not have exemptions are China, Japan, and Russia, I would make the argument that that's still a pretty solid distinction from where we are now. I mean, there are certainly, China in particular has been accused of dumping steel, just importing and bringing in rather cheap steel, right, that's imported into the U.S. And on the flip side, a company like Russia, I mean, Russia has some steel mills that it operates.

In fact, one of the guys I was talking to, he works for NLMK. It's in sort of the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. They import steel slabs. Those are those, you know, kind of semi-finished products from Russia. But the mill here employs hundreds of American workers. And this guy in particular, he was a Trump supporter. He voted for Donald Trump and is saying, you know, now I don't know what's going to happen to my mill because we are a Russian-owned mill. And so I think it's all kind of tricky because we're not able to sort of put the brakes on globalization

because at this point, things are kind of all mixed up. It's not so clear cut if we close things down and give an exemption to the EU that there won't be actual repercussions based on sort of where we're importing steel from other countries, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, it's like the global economy that Donald Trump talks about is a lot more cut and dried than the actual real world global economy. Yes. The world he talks about is very 1950s. You have to have steel or you can't be a country, he sometimes says. Because these are iconic American manufactured products that when he formed his worldview in the 70s and 80s, that was really important. You know, a lot of people, he got bipartisan agreement on his criticism that China was a trade cheat.

China steals intellectual property. China does forced technology transfer. Putting tariffs on Chinese steel has nothing to do with these other big problems. Although he is sending several of his top economic advisors to China to see if they can negotiate something this week. But a lot of times there's a couple of themes here. One is that Donald Trump often calls his own bluff. You know, he's not a great negotiator. He threatens the extreme position and then doesn't end up there, then backs down. But he also often asks the right question. And then, according to a lot of economists, provides the wrong answer.

And the other question I have, too, is if China is purportedly kind of the boogeyman, right, in this whole scenario, if it turns out that American car manufacturers that depend, say, on steel to make their cars end up having to sell those cars at a higher price, then wouldn't you make the argument that maybe like cheaper Chinese cars would actually then end up kind of coming out on top and winning, being able to import those cheap Chinese cars to parts of Europe or other countries in Asia. So it just makes me wonder to what degree, really, these tariffs are going to fully actually punish China in the long run. And, you know, you should have some economists on this podcast sometimes, because apparently the last couple of times that presidents, I think including Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, a lot of them have put tariffs on products.

It has ended up hurting the United States. All right. So we'll talk about that, whatever the news is, later this week. That is a wrap for today. If you want to send us a note or record one of those timestamps we use at the beginning of the show, it's NPR politics at NPR dot org. And you can keep up with our coverage on NPR dot org, NPR politics on Facebook and, of course, your local public radio station. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Emma Smacolid, political reporter. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon