Erin Nekervis
How do we know that Michelle Wolf’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner struck a nerve?
For one, the Russian Internet trolls have already jumped into action, proclaiming not only that she is a nasty woman but also spreading entirely fabricated claims that she was once arrested for bestiality.
Also, The New York Times is asking, “Did Michelle Wolf Kill the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?” And Bill O’Reilly, who was recently fired for saying and doing gross things to several women, just finished a Twitter tantrum calling Wolf’s “gross remarks” emblematic of the left’s “cruelty and extremism,” adding that progressives will look back in 2020 and regret “the huge victory Ms. Wolf has handed Trump.”
Yikes! Who knew the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an event the vast majority of American voters have never heard of, could be so important!
The biggest single source of outrage appears to be that Wolf compared Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to a wretched TV character. “I loved you as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaids Tale,” Wolf said, adding that she liked Sanders in part because she is “so resourceful.”
“She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye.”
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski’s condemnation was representative of the swift backlash from the Washington establishment: “Watching a wife and mother be humiliated for her looks is deplorable.”
But others, including Gloria Steinem, got it right. Aunt Lydia doesn’t resemble Sanders, but she is a key official in a fundamentalist wacko regime that has taken over the United States. That’s the joke, gilded with the barb about the source of Sanders’ eye shadow.
As Steinem tweeted, “The smart, funny and daring @michelleisawolf is being called out for laughing at Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ann Coulter—as if making jokes about any woman were anti-feminist.”
Why is it fair for Wolf’s critics to conclude that she was attacking Sanders’s looks, when the clear point of her joke was that Sanders produces a steady stream of lies. If I compare Trump to Tony Soprano, I’m not saying he’s fat and bald; I’m saying he operates likes a mob boss.
And when Trump was at his Comedy Central roast a few years ago and compared comedian Lisa Lampanelli to a cow and the obese rapper Biggie Smalls, he was saying she was fat. He also said that she should be a judge in his Miss Universe pageant. Why? Because she’s like the universe: “Constantly expanding and filled with dark matter.” The “dark matter” comment was a “joke” about her preference for dating African American men. A racist and sexist two-fer!
Reflexively attacking a woman’s appearance is as much a Trump trademark as gaudy gold.
He once got mad at New York Times columnist Gail Collins (for accurately reporting he’d gone bankrupt in the past) and sent her own photo to her with the handwritten caption, “face of a dog.” (And when Rosie O’Donnell brought up the bankruptcies, he said she had a “fat, ugly face.”)
And what about the supposed decorum of the Correspondents’ Dinner?
In 2016, comedian Larry Wilmore referred to President Obama as “my n*gga.”
When comedian Joel McHale hosted in 2014, he said the journalists looked like “ghouls,” made fun of Chris Christie’s weight, and said that MSNBC host Chris Hayes looked like a lesbian. He joked that Michelle Obama was such a hulk, she can tear a phonebook in half. He said John Boehner looked like an orange construction cone. He also wondered aloud if, after Chelsea Clinton’s first child was born, she would would present her father with a cigar.
Reflexively attacking a woman’s appearance is as much a Trump trademark as gaudy gold.
Way back at the 1996 dinner, Don Imus joked that Dan Rather was going to shoot his co-anchor Connie Chung in the head, referring to the grisly Vietnamese curbside execution shooting.
Tasteless and often sexist jokes, for sure. And, miraculously, the dinner continued.
While the Washington establishment was wringing its hands every time Wolf cracked a joke, Trump was addressing a crowd in Michigan, carried live on both CSPAN and Fox.
He played his familiar tune of Hispanic immigrants wanting nothing more than to travel all the way to the United States, just so they can commit violent crimes—ignoring a comprehensive study released a few days before by the University of Wisconsin showing that undocumented immigration to areas actually decreases violent crime.
At one point he asked, “Are there any Hispanics here . . . Hispanics?” Spoiler alert: There weren’t. The crowd hissed and Trump then replied, “No? Not so many? That's OK . . . and by the way, in all fairness, Kanye West gets it.” Because, you know, all non-whites are the same and West, who just said just yesterday slavery was “a choice,” is quite the ringing endorsement.
Nobody inside the Beltway seems to care about the not-so-thinly veiled racism Trump has spewed or that he made wildly defamatory accusations about a sitting U.S. Senator, saying Montana Democrat Jon Tester “should resign” because “I know things about Tester that I could say, too. And if I said them, he’d never be elected again.”
“Kanye West gets it.”
And I didn’t see a Twitter storm about the irony that Trump was casting unsubstantiated aspersions about Tester, who was was simply passing along the real accusations of over twenty people pertaining to Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump arbitrarily dismissed these as simply “false accusations about a great man.”
No, the pearl-clutching all seems to be about Michelle Wolf.
If only there was some kind of gathering, perhaps an an annual dinner, where the Washington press corps could all get together, perhaps poke a little fun, and gain some introspection . . .
Jud Lounsbury is a frequent contributor to The Progressive and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.