Michelle Wolf Angers the Right People With Her White House Correspondents Dinner Speech

You know what — if members of the Trump administration didn’t want to be mocked maybe they didn’t have to — you know, enable so much deportation of immigrants, barring of refugees, and bombing of Syria coming out of the White House.

Michelle Wolf came to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and, with the fury of Stephen Colbert’s classic monologue against George W. Bush, delivered a tight and brilliant set that goes deeper and is sharper than anything delivered by Late Night Shows. Maybe that’s what threw people off — the harshness of the jokes necessary for a wannabe dictator is something that the media wasn’t really used to.

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A few jokes in particular thrown towards Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Donald Trump’s press secretary, got everyone in the worst faith argument hail storm — one about her lying, and one about her betraying women. And it’s true. Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies a lot. Vox broke it down here. So anyway, the joke that got everyone in a real tizzy was —

“I think she’s very resourceful. She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

If anything, she’s saying her smokey eye is perfect. However, Republicans and certain incredibly weirdly bad members of the press twisted the quote into being about her looks. Who do they think Michelle Wolf is? The president? She’s not going to go after a woman’s looks!

Moving on, Michelle Wolf also compared her to Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid’s Tale — a woman who betrays other woman and gets them killed. Sarah Huckabee Sanders claims she took it as a slam on her looks, most likely because her entire thing is making the administration play victim, and also because there is zero chance she watched that show.

If you watched the video though, Michelle Wolf also burned for Democrats, including how they more or less excused Ted Kennedy’s drunk driving murder of a woman, and the Democrats’ incredible amount of inaction. Said Michelle Wolf: “You’re going to somehow lose by 12 points to someone named Jeff Pedophile Nazi Doctor,” but whatever — that would demand a level of critical thinking of the current journalistic and White House administration that we are not going to get here.

We expect the members of the administration to have bad faith readings, but it’s shocking and upsetting to watch the press do it too, even going so far as to release an apology for Michelle Wolf’s set. Here are some of the worst takes on these from people who choose to be harsher to a comedian than the President of the United States, including the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman who wrongly read the jokes as being about Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ looks.

Maybe the reason the press replied so limply to Michelle Wolf’s set is that of how it poked holes to just how compliant and easy the press has gotten around Trump, with jokes about how they’re secretly in love with him because they can’t stop talking about him.

More than anything though it’s the last two lines of Wolf’s set: “Like an immigrant who was brought here by his parents and didn’t do anything wrong, I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. Flint still doesn’t have clean water!” Two subjects that have been more or less ignored by the media figures in the room in favor of the more sensational Trump news.

Michelle Wolf did an amazing job, and the anger of her subjects is proof and parcel of this.

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