Trump Blames Speechwriters for His Comedic Flops at New York Charity Event

Former president Donald Trump blamed his speechwriters for the unfunny and mean-spirited jokes he made at a charity event on Thursday, calling them “idiots” and later telling Fox News that he “didn’t like” some of the jokes that were drafted for him.

“That’s a nasty one,” Trump said Thursday night, when a joke about Doug Emhoff, vice president Kamala Harris’s husband, elicited groans from the audience. “I told these idiots that gave me this stuff, that’s too tough.”

Trump’s joke—and his disavowal of it—both came during the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York on Thursday night, a long-running Catholic charity event. It’s traditional for presidential candidates to speak at the dinner during election years, delivering humorous (or would-be humorous) remarks to a crowd of well-heeled guests.

During Trump’s 30-minute set, which he delivered in person, he took aim at president Joseph Biden, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and New York mayor Eric Adams, among other Democratic figures. Harris, meanwhile, did not attend in person but submitted a prerecorded sketch with the actress Molly Shannon, to Trump’s apparent consternation.

While neither candidate was consistently funny—they are politicians, after all—Trump’s performance in particular sometimes seemed less comedic than spiteful. The former president opened with a meandering diatribe in which he repeatedly criticized Harris for skipping the dinner, complained about the lack of teleprompters and panned his audience as “Manhattan liberals.” Trump first acknowledged the attendees were not his “normal crowd,” to widespread laughter. “Many of you are Manhattan liberals from the media and the Democrat Party,” he then added, to more-or-less complete silence.

Trump’s political jokes, meanwhile, often took on a crude and personal edge. He quipped that Harris and Biden both possess the “mental faculties” of children and made an anti-trans gag about Walz having a menstrual period. He dropped his jokey demeanor entirely to attack former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who was in the audience.

“He was a terrible mayor—I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not. He was a terrible man,” Trump said.

Even Trump seemed to doubt the success of his comedy at points. Appearing to veer off script, he complained that he hadn’t wanted to make any jokes at all—and that he didn’t know if the jokes he’d made were funny. On Fox & Friends the next morning, host Steve Doocy complimented Trump and asked where he got his material, which Trump himself then panned.

“I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people,” Trump said. “A couple people from Fox—actually, I shouldn’t say that, but they wrote some jokes. For the most part, I didn’t like any of them.” (Fox News later claimed that “no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes.”)

Notably, this is not Trump’s first misfire at an Al Smith dinner. By his own admission, he also “went overboard” in 2016 when roasting Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton. “I knew I was in trouble around midway through, because…even my own side was angry at me,” Trump said Thursday. “They were saying ‘it’s too much,’ but I did it anyway.”