Trump Mocks Colin Jost and Calls Joe Biden ‘Crooked Joe’

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is famously credited for bringing a seething Donald Trump into the presidential fray during the Obama administration, then boycotted by Trump while in office.

And it remains an object of Trump’s ire.

“The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was really bad,” Trump wrote late Saturday night in a Truth Social post after the latest edition. “Colin Jost BOMBED, and Crooked Joe was an absolute disaster! Doesn’t get much worse than this!”

Despite the criticism, Jost did take shots at President Joe Biden.

“I have to admit, it’s not easy following President Biden,” he said, according to The Washington Post. “I mean, it’s not always easy following what he’s saying.”

Biden’s age was also the butt of jokes.

“You know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, ‘maybe I can win this thing,'” Jost said. “He’s only 99.”

Jost was also self-deprecating, noting he has a “very punchable face,” and mocked Biden for losing Democrats’ long-owned support of the Black vote.

“My Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che was going to join me here tonight, but in solidarity with President Biden, I decided to lose all my Black support,” Jost said. “Che told me to say that, and I’m just realizing I was set up.”

Trump sat in the audience in 2011, listening to then-President Barack Obama’s criticism. Many political watchers linked it to Trump’s subsequent decision to run for president in 2016.

Trump was the only president not to attend the elitist White House Correspondents’ Dinner since President Calvin Coolidge, according to MSNBC.

That did not stop Trump from being the focus of White House attention.

“Yes, age is an issue: I’m a grown man, running against a 6-year-old,” Biden, 81, said.

“Age is the only thing we have in common. My vice president actually endorses me.”

Antisemitic Hamas supporters were not a fan of Biden or the dinner either.

Hundreds of protesters outside condemned Biden for Israel’s ongoing war on Hamas.

“Shame on you!” protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.

“Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide,” crowds chanted at one point.

Other protesters lay sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of flak vests with “press” insignia, suggesting death to journalists.

Protesters cried “Free, free Palestine.” They cheered when at one point someone inside the Washington Hilton — where the dinner has been held for decades — unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.

Biden’s motorcade Saturday took an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton than in previous years, largely avoiding the crowds of protesters.

“How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to?” a demonstrator asked guests heading in. “You are complicit.”

Material from Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.