Donald Trump At Al Smith Dinner A Bad Joke With Worse Punch Lines
Kamala Harris was right to stay away.
Donald Trump yukked it up at the Al Smith Dinner last week like an old, mentally incontinent Andrew Dice Clay. It was a disgrace, a further normalization of a monster. Michael Gold at the New York Times wrote, “The two people running for president in one of the most pivotal and divisive elections in American history both tried to be funny at a Catholic charity event on Thursday night.”
Gold doesn’t mention that one of those two people is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist. Trump forever benefits from the mainstream media’s insistence on covering this election through the hazy gauze of moral relativity.
“Results were mixed at best, uncomfortable at worst,” he went on. “Maybe it didn’t cost them any votes. Certainly, it cost them some laughs.”
Kamala Harris didn’t appear in person at the Al Smith Dinner, a white-tie event that raises funds for Catholic charities, but she did film a video with Molly Shannon as her Saturday Night Live character, Mary Katherine Gallagher. (Watch below.)
Gold claimed “the vice president’s absence robbed the event of some of its electricity,” though it’s unclear how much electricity a Catholic event can generate. Harris had a scheduling conflict with a campaign event in Wisconsin, which is a state she needs to win to prevent another Donald Trump apocalypse. I think her priorities were in the right place.
Her absence isn’t even that newsworthy. Democrat Walter Mondale didn’t attend the dinner in 1984, but that’s not why he lost 49 states. Presidential candidates from both parties skipped the dinner in 1992, 1996, and 2004. What is historic is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist hobnobbing with Timothy Dolan, the current Archbishop of New York. Dolan was apparently more offended that Harris didn’t attend the event in person. Host Jim Gaffigan also wondered why Harris didn’t leave the campaign trail for the event. No one seemed to wonder why Harris should appear in a jovial context with Trump, who refuses to debate her again or pronounce her name correctly.
The long gone days of normality
The Alfred E. Smith dinner was usually an opportunity for presidential candidates to appear together, for a charitable cause, during the final stretch of the campaign. It was an opportunity for gentle roasting and self-deprecating humor. In 2012, Barack Obama praised his opponent Mitt Romney as a “family man and a loving father .. two titles that will always matter more than any political ones. We may have different political perspectives but … I’m certain we share the hope that the next four years will reflect the same decency and the same willingness to come together for a higher purpose that was on display this evening.”
Donald Trump, of course, is incapable of such grace. At the 2016 dinner, he lobbed insults and cheap shots at Hillary Clinton like a schoolyard bully. He was his usual vicious self on Friday, and his digs at Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and President Joe Biden were hateful and cruel, which is what MAGA considers comedy.
“If you really wanted Vice President Harris to accept your invitation, I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis, and she would have been here, guaranteed,” said the convicted felon who’s currently free on bail.
He was booed at one point when he said, “The only piece of advice I would have for [Harris] in the event that she wins is not to let her husband Doug anywhere near the nannies.” That was especially tasteless but also reflected a larger truth: Trump would offer no helpful advice or kind words to Harris if she wins.
“That’s a nasty one,” he added. “I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.”
Trump’s material was not that far removed from the usual garbage he spews at his hate rallies, but he claims he had help from some folks at Fox News. Michael Gold at the New York Times apparently thought this “zinger” about Walz was amusing: “Unfortunately, Governor Walz isn’t here himself. But don’t worry, he’ll say that he was.”
Gold allows the insult to exist in a vacuum, without acknowledging that Trump is an inveterate liar who has based his entire campaign on racist smears.
Coups are worse than slaps
Actor Will Smith received a 10-year ban from the Motion Picture Academy after he slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. You’d think the Al Smith dinner would consider a similar ban for any presidential candidate with Trump’s record. Sure, he never literally slapped someone, but he sicced a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol and didn’t care if his own vice president lived or died. Grand juries of his peers have indicted him on multiple counts for trying to overturn the last election.
A jury found him liable for sexual assault and repeatedly defaming his victim. A New York jury convicted him in May for falsifying business records to coverup hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels, who he had sex with while his wife was at home with their newborn son. (We can imagine the outrage if Kamala Harris had gone for the jugular with jokes about Trump’s noted infidelity and legal challenges.)
Trump’s own policies are abhorrent. He’s threatened to use the military against U.S. citizens who dare defy him. He plans to go full Hitler on immigrants, and from his rhetoric, it seems like the only distinction he makes between “legal” and “illegal” is skin color.
The Al Smith dinner is not politically neutral. In 1996, Cardinal John O'Connor didn’t invite the presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, because President Clinton had vetoed a late-term abortion ban. Vice President Al Gore and Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp attended in their place.
The dinner is named in honor of the former New York governor and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1928. Al Smith was the first Roman Catholic nominated for president, and anti-Catholic bigotry contributed greatly to his loss against Herbert Hoover. Smith lost Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, which had all voted Democratic in 1924. He was also a racial justice ally, who appointed Black people to the New York City school system and civil service commission. Trump has a far less illustrious record with Black Americans.
Black newspapers, including the The Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, endorsed Smith’s presidency, and civil rights activist Walter White from the NAACP wrote that “Governor Smith is by far the best man available for the Presidency” and “[his] nomination and election would be the greatest blow at bigotry that has ever been struck.” He was already unpopular in the deep South because of his religious faith, but he connected with Black voters there because of his reputation as a “spokesman for ethnic minorities in Northern cities.” Smith opposed the Klu Klux Klan and Nazism or what Trump considers his base.
Perhaps Trump’s presence at the function was fitting considering the Catholic Church’s own history of corruption, but it’s an insult to Al Smith’s memory. Catholics regularly confess their sins and seek atonement. Trump embraces his sins, which he considers his personal strength. “Catholics, you’ve got to vote for me,” he raved like a common thug. “You better remember: I’m here, and she’s not.”
That’s what Donald Trump is, and it’s no joke.
Reminder: Charles Manson never kill anyone himself (that we know of), but was convicted of murdering Sharon Tate and others in 1969. He instigated members of his cult to commit the murders in order to start a race war, which thankfully did not happen. trump is guilty of treason, and murder, even though he didn't storm the Capitol himself on J6, or killed anyone that day or in 2020 during the pandemic. He instigated members of his cult to storm the Capitol and to kill Speaker Pelosi and VP Pence, but while unsuccessful, they did kill. Before that, due to his mishandling of the Covid pandemic, millions of Americans died needlessly. He's a traitor and a murderer. Shame of the organizers of the Al Smith dinner inviting him and yukking it up with him, and his cruel attempts at humor. Good for the VP not attending. It was more important for her to be in Wisconsin. As for the NYT, and it's hacks, they are a lost cause.
I was just lamenting on Pervert Justice that people don't have a sense of history when it comes to trans people. Mention trans folk and suddenly the topic is so frighteningly out of the public's comfort zone that they refuse to connect us and our issues with anything that has come before, however obviously related.
The same seems true of the Catholic Church and its history of abetting rape. Timothy Dolan is not free of the taint of enabling rapists' access to victims, and one would think that the man going on to hire a rapist as the entertainment for his charity ball would draw many condemnations of this obvious sign that neither Dolan nor the RCC has learned the necessary lessons from the Spotlight shined on their history of grotesque sexual abuse.
Instead we get nothing from the NYT or any outlet of similar national note.
For the record:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/opinion/cardinal-dolan-and-the-sex-abuse-scandal.html
https://www.chrisoleary.com/sins/Dolan-Cardinal-Timothy.html
For this man to promote a rapist -- I mean, for anyone to do so, but in particular this man who has asserted his intent to make the church better on this issue than it has been in the past -- is nothing less than obscene.