Press Stunned Gridiron Dinner With Jan. 6 Comedy Skit — Minutes Before Biden Scorched Trump And Rioters
AP Photo/John Minchillo
Attendees at the Gridiron Club Dinner were stunned by a comedy skit making light of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — particularly when President Joe Biden capped his speech by torching former President Donald Trump and the rioters.
As was once customary for the office, President Biden headlined the 137th Annual Gridiron Club Dinner, one of many annual media dinners — but easily one of the most secretive. This year’s appearance was the first in-person attendance by a sitting president since 2018.
Cameras are not permitted, and very little “art” ever escapes the room. Some attendees posted snapshots on social media, and one shared a video of Biden speaking on the phone after the dinner with an audience member’s mother.
The dinner consists of skits and speeches, usually in the celebrity roast style that is SOP for these sorts of dinners, although the lack of video cameras lends an extra dash of brutality to the proceedings.
Coverage of the event featured descriptions of several of the skits performed by members of the Gridiron Club representing news organizations, including a song mocking Biden and Trump over the issue of age and a Clarence Thomas impersonation of a Beatles parody that went “Lend me your plane, and your yacht would be nice, and please finance my fancy RV…” to the tune of “With a Little Help From My Friends.”
But what went unreported was a skit that made light of the January 6 insurrection, and featured a member of the press — a reporter for The Washington Post — in costume as the so-called QAnon Shaman, according to multiple sources.
The joking from the stage and the laughter from the members of the press in the audience stunned many of the other guests, according to a source familiar with the event, especially in contrast to Biden’s remarks.
The president spent just over half of his speech rattling off jokes like the other speakers, but then made a serious pivot to the insurrection:
In the coming months, Kamala and I will be making the case how Americans are better off than four years ago, how we got so much through the pandemic, turned around the economy, reestablished America’s leadership in the world. All without encouraging the American people to inject bleach. (Laughter.) All without destroying the economy, embarrassing us around the world, or — or itching for insurrection.
Look, I wish these were jokes, but they’re not. As I said in my State of the Union Address, we live in an unprecedented moment in democracy, an unpre- — and an unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack.
Biden went on to laud the press and shred Trump for attacking them as “the enemy of the people”:
Here at home, our basic freedom is under assault — the freedom to vote, the freedom to choose, and so much more.
The lies about the 2020 election, the plots to overturn it, to embrace the January 6th insurrectionists pose the gravest threat to our democracy since the American Civil War.
In 2020, they failed. But you all know the threat remains, a poison cours- — coursing through the veins of our democracy. Disinformation everywhere. There’s a toxic cycle of anger and conspiracy. Massive — massive changes in the media industry, with pursue, with pursue, with pursue. Pursuing what? Pursuing heat and pursuing — instead of light.
All the while, the other guy calls you the free press. Well, he calls you the enemy of the people, even as many of you risk your lives to do your job and sometimes even give your lives to do your jobs.
The president’s remarks contrasted sharply with the earlier skit, which many attendees felt was “inappropriate” at best. Another called it “vulgar.”
“It felt trivializing and out of place, especially since so many fellow journalists were in danger on January 6th and are, to this day, threatened for telling the truth about the conspiracies that led to it,” said one source who was at the dinner.
