{"id":42049,"date":"2026-07-25T17:36:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T15:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/?p=42049"},"modified":"2026-07-25T17:36:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T15:36:56","slug":"der-praesident-als-pausenclown-60-minuten-in-denen-er-den-saal-verlor-und-die-ver-fassung-gleich-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/en\/der-praesident-als-pausenclown-60-minuten-in-denen-er-den-saal-verlor-und-die-ver-fassung-gleich-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"The President as Court Jester: 60 Minutes in Which He Lost the Room and His Composure Along With It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington, D.C. - On Friday evening, beneath the chandeliers of the Waldorf Astoria, a hotel that once belonged to him and today merely still carries his scent, the most powerful man in the Western world stepped up to the podium and seemed unsure who he wanted to be. What exactly are we doing here, he asked the room. Am I supposed to be funny? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian? He promised to be a little of everything, and he kept that promise in the worst way imaginable. For 1 hour, he really was a little of everything - except funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was the rescheduled dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association, the event that had ended in panic 3 months earlier when an armed man forced his way through security at the Washington Hilton. Now came the second attempt, smaller, easier to secure, inside a ballroom whose splendor the speaker simply couldn't ignore. Look at these beautiful chandeliers, he told the audience. I could tell you everything about them. Later he returned to the subject and revealed what he had supposedly intended to keep to himself, that they were made of Bohemian crystal, not American crystal, and that he would love to walk out carrying them under his arm because you couldn't buy them anywhere. A man who attends a dinner honoring the press and openly jokes about stealing the furniture has already said more about himself than any newspaper column ever could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The president who spent that evening honoring the work of journalists is the very same president who, just 1 week earlier, demanded that 2 television networks lose their broadcast licenses because he didn't like their news coverage. The audience was asked to applaud the Pentagon correspondents, and nobody mentioned that his secretary of defense, who was sitting right there in the room, had been trying to throw those very reporters out of the Pentagon while his administration was fighting a new war. Earlier this month, the administration issued subpoenas seeking the phone records and testimony of journalists who had reported on security flaws involving the presidential aircraft gifted by Qatar. On Thursday, a federal judge in Manhattan sharply rebuked the Justice Department over those subpoenas, after which the administration withdrew them. One of the reporters who had been targeted, Tyler Pager, walked to the front of the room on Friday night to accept an award, while the president whose administration had just tried to dig through his communications sat there applauding - or perhaps not applauding at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most embarrassing moment of the evening didn't belong to him, but it was about him. Wolf Blitzer called the Wall Street Journal reporters to the stage, honoring them for their reporting on the president's past ties to financier Jeffrey Epstein. And Blitzer kept going, clearly and without mercy. The president, he said, had responded by filing a $20 billion lawsuit against the newspaper, publicly revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar's home address, forcing her family to move, and banning the paper from Air Force One. As the award winners accepted their trophies, the president theatrically threw his hands into the air, the way someone does when they're trying to say, well, what can you do. Nervous laughter rippled through the room, the laughter of people who recognized that raised hand as an admission and didn't know what to do with themselves while the award winners held their trophies close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n