When he gets hit with a TV joke, Donald Trump will cry on Twitter. This charming personality trait has two obvious consequences: first, it makes him spend a lot of time on Twitter; second, prompts him to not attend White House correspondents' dinner - an annual ceremony in which US presidents bring journalists together in a room and traditionally pretend they like them.
For the first time in a long time, the President missed dinner. The last president to do so was Ronald Reagan in 1981, who at the time presented a pretty good excuse: he had just been shot. Even so, he ended up speaking on the phone. I had no political sympathy for Reagan, but there is something in the sense of humor that brings us closer to adversaries, and there is also anything in the lack of sense of humor that repels us even in friends.
While dinner was going on, Trump was elsewhere in the country speaking at one of those rallies that no one knows if they still belong to the previous election campaign or whether they are already part of the next. Not being able to brag of having fulfilled any of his promises (and, given the promises in question, it would have been more appropriate to brag about not having fulfilled them), Trump bragged that he had set a now popular expression: "fake news". Perhaps this was the only time Trump gave way to modesty: he did not just invent the expression "fake news", he seems like a fake news. It's been 100 days and I still can not believe it. I'm still convinced he's the stupidest joke ever. A hoax. I believe the Americans have gone to the moon. I still have doubts that they have elected Donald Trump.
Hasan Minhaj, the comedian invited to speak at dinner, recalled that the foundation of an open society is freedom of speech, and he regretted that the president was not present to celebrate it. I know that putting the world upside down has a great humorous potential. But it is an operation to be carried out with parsimony. Living on a planet where the president of the world's greatest power is a clown and the clowns exhibit a sense of state to be permanently upside down. I begin to feel blood throbbing in my temples. Put everything as it was, please.