WASHINGTON, D.C. – “Nerd prom,” also known as the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, is a 111-year-old excuse for news reporters, editors, producers, and hangers-on to celebrate themselves, as if that didn’t happen enough every day.
However, in Trump’s second term, the official dinner is said to have taken quite the nosedive.
“Boring as hell,” one attendee told me. “Pointless,” said another. Instead, as has been the trajectory for some years, the satellite events to the main gala were where the fun was said to be had.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harpreet host events over the WHCA weekend, with state embassies and ambassadors’ residences throwing open their doors and taxpayer-underwritten liquor stashes for the disturbingly parched press corps to ravage.
Like a scene out of Attenborough: “And here… you see… the yellow-breasted hack quenching her thirst for Moët at alarming rates for some. But… for her… this is just the Thursday night warm-up.”
With the proliferation of canapés, you’d think most guests could, themselves, be turned into foie gras by Monday. That is, had they not also pickled their livers. But who am I to talk?
Saturday night also saw the tongue-in-cheek “Uninvited” party at Butterworth’s, owned in part by yours truly, with a fundraiser for Helping a Hero (please give generously) on the ground floor, and Bannon’s almighty audience upstairs causing only the kinds of carnage we have come to love and expect.
Qorvis and Mercuria co-sponsored Helping a Hero, while upstairs, The National Pulse and Human Events co-hosted the WarRoom soirée.
At one point, we hauled out two suckling pigs–one on each floor–which lasted about eight minutes as some guests, clearly unsatisfied with the metric tonne of hors d’oeuvres, wasted no time tearing poor Babe limb from face.
A special shout-out to the guests of honor, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Kari Lake, Lady Victoria Hervey, White House staff secretary Will Scharf, Sean Spicer, Alex Swoyer, and about two dozen liberal news reporters who had come to see what all the fuss was about.
The fuss, in short, was about a new cadre of D.C. residents who have flown in from all over the country to take up jobs in the Trump administration. Those still “uninvited” from the primary WHCA weekend’s events formed the backbone of the only party on Capitol Hill that night.
After hours, guests took private hire buses to the Swiss Ambassador’s residence across town, where raclette and dancing went into the early morning hours.
On Sunday, many braved the hangovers to attend garden or rooftop parties. You may be pleased to know that I abstained through most of it, though I did succumb to my first ever invitation to the British Ambassador’s Residence, thanks to my new pal, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ aka Peter Mandelson.
I’ll let you know how that relationship develops.
