While the White House Correspondents Association has no problem bowing its head and kissing the ring of the man who spends almost every waking hour (when he’s not golfing) belittling their work, questioning their morals, and encouraging his supporters to spit threats at them after his pathetic rallies, White House Correspondents Dinner host Michelle Wolf has no interest in surrendering her backbone so easily. In an NPR interview set to air tomorrow (via Deadline), Wolf says she stands by every “controversial” thing she said at Saturday’s event—including that willfully misunderstood reference to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ “perfect smoky eye.”
Wolf says she went into the night wanting “to do something different,” choosing instead to play to “the outside audience” rather than just the political pundits and press people in attendance. She also made an effort not to “burn [the event] to the ground,” noting that the old way of doing things—in which the president would gently roast the press and then the host would gently roast the president—doesn’t work anymore now that Donald Trump refuses to attend and we’re in a “much more serious environment.” She also pointed out that people like Sanders need to have a sense of humor about themselves, since plenty of people told “pretty aggressive jokes about Obama” right to his face that he still laughed at.
Wolf even argues that Sanders deserved having some cracks directed at her, since she refused to stand for any of the journalists who accepted awards at the event. If the dinner was “about celebrating the media,” Wolf says, then “she wasn’t there to celebrate the media.” The way Wolf sees it, people are pretending to be outraged by what she said so they don’t have to actually listen to what she said, like the fact that Sanders is an unrepentant liar, that the media needs to address how it assisted in (and benefited from) the rise of Trump, and—as she noted at the end of her set—that “Flint still doesn’t have clean water.”
But sure, let’s just keep dropping our monocles and clutching our pearls because of how mean she was to the bad people who hate all of us.