While the rest of the nation needs a day off to recover from a debate-sourced emotional hangover, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will actually have to stomach food next to each other tonight at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria (expect some traffic in midtown!) Tradition also mandates the two candidates poke fun at themselves and each other, which should be easy enough for someone as thick-skinned and self-effacing as the Donald.
The white-tie dinner, which benefits Catholic charities, celebrates Al Smith, a former Governor of New York and the first Catholic to win a presidential nomination back in the pre-#PussyGrabGate year of 1928. Since 1960, presidential candidates have been invited to roast their opponents, but some good-natured self-deprecation is expected, too—in 2012, a tuxedo-clad Mitt Romney joked that it was "nice to finally relax and wear what Ann and I wear around the house," while Obama noted re: his crappy first debate performance, "As some of you may have noticed, I had a lot more energy in our second debate. I felt really well-rested after the nice, long nap I had in the first debate."
Presidents are not great comedians, but it is nice when candidates can be civil to one another, which is something both Donald "Such A Nasty Woman" Trump and Hillary "What Is With This Fucking Guy?" Clinton have struggled with in the last couple of debates (though, in fairness, if any person spoke to me in the sniveling tone Trump uses to address Clinton, I'd physically assault him and do my prison time in stride). It's hard to imagine this year's candidates poking gentle fun at each other.
Still harder, though, is imagining Trump making jokes about himself. I have never seen Trump laugh, and aside from his apparent "jokes" about, say, sexual assault, or encouraging a foreign nation to hack our emails, it does not appear that he has much of a sense of humor, least of all about himself. This is a man who criticized SNL for parodying him, even though SNL invited him to sully its stage last year. This is a man who, when roasted by Seth Meyers at the 2011 White House Press Correspondents Dinner, sat stony-faced and silently seethed. He didn't seem to enjoy Obama's jokes, either:
So, tonight Hillary will probably make some lame jokes about how she's basically a reanimated corpse or a robot, while Trump will threaten to sue everyone in the room. Should be fun! It's also noteworthy that the former governor/presidential candidate whom this dinner memorializes was one of Trump's father's ideological enemies. Fred Trump, the man who sired our current national nightmare, was arrested at a Ku Klax Klan rally in Queens 1927, while protesting the "Roman Catholic police of New York City" who were allegedly assaulting "Native-born Protestant Americans."
This anti-Catholic outrage came right around the time Smith was discussing making a presidential run, and Smith made combating bigotry a part of his campaign platform. “I, as the candidate of the Democratic Party, owe it to the people of this country to discuss frankly and opening with them this attempt … to inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign which should be an intelligent debate of the important issues which confront the American people,” he said in a broadcasted 1928 speech.
Perhaps Smith's ghost will be kind enough to grace us with a cameo tonight.
