The annual Gridiron Club and Foundation Dinner — for the first time in its 140-year history — did not raise a glass to the sitting president, reported multiplemediaoutlets.
Instead, attendees at Saturday’s closed-door event at the Grand Hyatt Washington toasted the First Amendment. It was a pointed shift in a night known for its bipartisan roasting of politicians and the media alike.
The break from tradition underscored the growing hostility between the press and President Donald Trump’s administration which, in another departure, declined to send a representative to the shindig.
“Nobody went because either we were busy working or we just don’t care to be recognized by that crowd,” a Trump White House official told Politico.
Trump himself attended the event in 2018.
Back then, he struck a more conciliatory tone in praising some journalists as “incredible, brilliant, powerful, smart, and fair people” who “support and sustain our democracy.” Trump now frequently refers to media who report critically on him as the “enemy of the people.”
At last year’s dinner, then-President Joe Biden cracked jokes about Trump’s cognitive abilities and memory but also warned of the threat to democracy if Trump returned to office.
“We live in an unprecedented moment in democracy,” said Biden. “An unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says to him, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’”