In a bizarre and gross incident that came on Saturday night after the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, journalists appeared to laugh at President Trump after president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) said he would be speaking.
That came when the WHCA president, Wijia Jiang, took the podium less than an hour after the attack occurred and shots were fired at the event, in which time the president and the senior officials in his administration had been successfully evacuated from the event by the law enforcement authorities, namely the Secret Service.
Jiang, speaking at the podium, told members of the media who were still gathered that the president would be holding a briefing on the matter at the White House, which bizarrely prompted a short and sputtering outburst of laughter, with it being unclear whether they were laughing at him, at the incident, or at the idea of him speaking.
The laughter was loud enough that Jiang, who herself bizarrely smiled and chuckled to herself at the idea of the president giving a press conference after facing yet another assassination attempt, had to say, “That is not a joke.” Journalists nevertheless continued to laugh after she made that point.
Jiang had said to the gathered press corps, when she appeared at the podium earlier on, that President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were safe, as were the members of the Trump Administration cabinet who had been hastily evacauted. “Everybody’s safe,” she said, which prompted only a smattering of light applause.
Continuing, Jiang noted that the president didn’t want to let the event be cancelled for good, saying, “And he [Trump] insists that we will reschedule this event in the next 30 days, and that he wanted to do it tonight.” Jiang added, “He wanted to continue despite the news, but has to follow security protocol.”
Still not done, she then patted journalists on the back for their supposed service to America, saying,, “I said earlier tonight that journalism is a public service, because when there is an emergency, we run to the crisis, not away from it. And on a night when we are thinking about the freedoms in the First Amendment, we must also think about how fragile they are. I saw all of you reporting, and that’s what we do.”
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Watch the bizarre laughing incident here:
President Trump, for his part, said in his speech after the incident occurred, “It’s always shocking when something like this happens. Happened to me, a little bit. And that never changes.” He continued, “I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people — the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln.” He added, “The people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after. They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much.”
He then said, “We have to, we have to resolve our differences. I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.”