It turns out the creepiest thing about this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner wasn’t incoming WHCA President Eugene Daniels’ increasingly perverse wardrobe, but the giddy attendance of Lara Trump.
Recall the “dinner” as Washington DC’s annual tradition wherein TV news people, newspaper reporters, and White House officials let it all hang out to drink and selfie with C-list celebrities for a week, all under the pretense of awarding scholarships to budding reporters. During Donald Trump’s term, a few administration staffers attended but the president never did. In retrospect, that was kind of a quaint time of personal animus rarely exceeding a few childish insults traded between Trump and the nerds who wrote about him.
In 2024, it’s not so cute. Lara’s father-in-law has since been found out to have been framed by the FBI; impeached twice by his political opponents; threatened with bankruptcy by a Democrat judge and attorney general; threatened with prison time by two other Democrat district attorneys; and faced yet more criminal prosecution by the current administration’s Justice Department. That’s all between stints of Democrat officials around the country attempting to ensure Trump’s name won’t even appear on ballots.
Against that backdrop, Lara thought it befitting to tweet on Saturday that she was heading out to the correspondents’ dinner for a night of fun with all the people rooting for her father-in-law’s insolvency, defeat, and, ideally, imprisonment. Included in the tweet was a short video of Lara twirling in an evening gown and blowing a kiss to the camera. Thereafter, the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee was seen enjoying herself and mingling with other attendees at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner is hosted and complemented by a red-carpet entrance.
Lara sat there as a parade of depravity took place, starting with Politico’s Daniels dressed like a big-backed version of that blue alien in “The Fifth Element” (1997), followed by the president of the United States mocking her in-law’s legal jeopardy, for which Joe Biden is in no small part responsible. The New York Times dryly noted that Biden’s fun little roast of this predecessor served as a “split-screen between a president on the campaign trail and a former president spending his days in a courtroom.”
In an emailed statement to me, RNC and Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said that under Lara’s leadership with Chairman Michael Whatley, “The RNC has smashed fundraising records, launched the most extensive election integrity operation in history, ended the month of March with $93.1 million cash on hand, launched BidenBloodbath.com to highlight the horrors of Joe Biden’s border crisis, and worked hand and hand with the campaign to ensure that President Trump wins big in November.” She added that “in just two months, RNC leadership has accomplished unprecedented success, and they are just getting started.”
Maybe that will assuage the concerns of Lara’s online critics, would-be Trump supporters who weren’t as delighted by her attendance at the dinner as she was.
To be sure, it’s not in itself a conflict that Lara went to the dinner. Plenty of right-wingers, real and fake, have gone every year since the beginning. But this isn’t like all the years before, and Lara is acting like it is.
Oh, well. Maybe that “extensive election integrity operation” is coming along so well that she deserved the night off.
