On the eve of the upcoming 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner, President Trump will be miles away from DC and from the lion’s den of so-called reporters who would love nothing more than to destroy him at the event. President Trump has chosen instead to spend the evening connecting with the voters who shocked the nation when they overwhelmingly turned out for him on election day in the formerly blue state of Pennsylvania.

Trump made the announcement on Twitter: “Next Saturday night I will be holding a BIG rally in Pennsylvania. Look forward to it!” 

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/855816071663812608

Can anyone blame him?

Only 6 years ago, hundreds of leftist media hacks were doubled over in laughter while Barack Obama openly mocked Donald Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner.

Little did the media at that White House Correspondents Dinner know, that the man they were so thrilled to see being mocked by our former Community Organizer in Chief would be our next President. They never dreamed that the man they were mocking while he sat defenseless that night would literally turn the once “trusted” media on its head. For the first time ever, Trump forced the media to play defense instead of assuming the offensive posture they’d been used to taking against Republicans and conservatives for decades. Trump shamed them for using their publications and networks to promote the Democrat Party and their radical agenda, and America cheered.

McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed wrote about the mistake Obama made that night when he brought the “birther” nonsense to a head which (according to her) overrode Obama’s better judgment and led him to tear into Trump to his face:

On the night of the dinner, Trump took his seat at the center of the ballroom, perfectly situated so that all 2,500 lawmakers, movie stars, journalists, and politicos in attendance could see him….But as soon as the plates were cleared and the program began, it became agonizingly clear that Trump was not royalty in this room: He was the court jester.

The president used his speech to pummel Trump with one punchline after another…When host Seth Meyers took the mic, he piled on with his own rat-a-tat of jokes, many of which seemed designed deliberately to inflame Trump’s outer-borough insecurities: “His whole life is models and gold leaf and marble columns, but he still sounds like a know-it-all down at the OTB.”

The longer the night went on, the more conspicuous Trump’s glower became. He didn’t offer a self-deprecating chuckle, or wave warmly at the cameras, or smile with the practiced good humor of the aristocrats and A-listers who know they must never allow themselves to appear threatened by a joke at their expense. Instead, Trump just sat there, stone-faced, stunned, simmering — Carrie at the prom covered in pig’s blood.

Watch:

Obama, of course, had his reasons for wanting petty vengeance over the birth certificate controversy, which he not-unreasonably regarded as racist. But he’s also the prime example of a guy who has always been the coolest kid in the room (“I’m LeBron, baby”), and the spectacle of him using the platform of an event originally designed for lèse-majesté to lock arms with a TV comic and gang-tackle Trump’s ego to his face to the laughter of a crowd that Obama fit into and Trump didn’t is one of the more graceless things he’s done. His speechwriters, John Favreau and Jon Lovett, express some remorse now for having let the “circus-like atmosphere” goad them, and Obama, into it. One doubts that the president has any second thoughts; he rarely does.

But what comes off clearly is that the WHCD has become just another vehicle for amplifying, rather than leavening, the presidential megaphone and the bitterness of our present politics, while widening the gulf between the DC “cool kids” and the rest of the country. It’s a tradition that has outlived its usefulness, and should die. –National Review

Obama used his last White House Correspondents dinner to joke about it possibly being “perhaps the last White House Correspondents Dinner”. It may have been the only thing he said that night that may actually turn out to be true.