Over the course of American history, a few undelivered presidential speeches have taken on iconic status in the decades after they were supposed to have been given.
There’s the address John F. Kennedy would have delivered in defense of American soft power as a bulwark against communism and authoritarian threats, in which he would have declared that there was “no better form of investment in our national security” than foreign aid and warned that American leadership was dependent on global “respect for our mission in the world.”
There was Richard Nixon’s planned address to the nation in the event that Apollo 11’s lunar module engine failed to light, stranding astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — “the men who went to the moon to explore in peace” — to “stay on the moon to rest in peace.”
And of course, there’s the “speech of love” to the American news media that Donald Trump says he would have delivered had Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner been allowed to resume after a gunman attempted to sprint through layers of security in a failed attempt to assassinate the president and the senior officials who were scattered around the cavernous ballroom at the Washington, D.C. Hilton.
In the run-up to the weekend’s marquee event — an annual fundraiser for scholarships administered by the White House Correspondents Association — media critics and political pundits spilled what would have probably been hundreds of gallons of ink in a pre-digital era on the propriety of the press breaking bread with a man who has spent years demonizing them as “the enemy of the people.”
Would Trump use the open microphone before a captive audience of his longtime adversaries to go on the attack at a dinner meant as a celebration of the First Amendment?
It was a good question — one Trump was more than willing to answer at what became probably the only Black Tie news conference in White House history. He told reporters he “was all set to really rip it” until the shooting, after which he mused that his planned remarks would’ve been “the most inappropriate speech ever made.”
He even offered some praise for the thousands of journalists (your correspondent included) who’d endured the horrific events, remarking that he’d seen “a room that was just totally unified” in the wake of the attempted shooting.
A day later, he told Fox News that during the brief time he was pushing to continue on with the program before Secret Service forced him to return to the White House, he tasked his aides with writing replacement remarks, what he called “a speech of love.”
“But I didn’t get a chance to do that,” he added.
He later told CBS News’ 60 Minutes something similar when he described pushing to remain at the venue over his bodyguards’ objections, telling correspondent Norah O’Donnell: “I would have had to just get up and say, ‘I love you all.’ And there was love in the room. It was amazing. There was love in the room.”
But whatever goodwill he had briefly felt towards the country’s news media and the First Amendment that allows it to operate freely appeared to vanish in an instant hours later, when he sat for what he might have expected to be a softball interview with O’Donnell.
Although the network that was once home to Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather has undergone a decidedly pro-Trump makeover since it was purchased by billionaire David Ellison last year, under the stewardship of former New York Times conservative opinion journalist Bari Weiss, O’Donnell didn’t go to work to throw softballs on Sunday.
Instead, she asked him to respond to the words written by his would-be assassin, who allegedly wrote that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes” in a manifesto sent to family members just before the attempted shooting.
Trump’s reaction? Predictable.
Less than a day after he could have well been shot, he threw away talk of “unity” and went after the messenger.
“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're-- you're he-- you're horrible people,” he said as he launched into one of the most surreal presidential soliloquies in the history of the long-running program.
“I'm not a pedophile. Excuse me. Excuse me. I'm not a pedophile … I got associated with all-- stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, little's say, Epstein or other things,” he said.
“You shouldn't be reading that on 60 Minutes. You're a disgrace. But go ahead. Let's finish the interview.”
If there was ever a post-shooting honeymoon between Trump and the press, it was over at that moment.
Within a day, he, his wife, and his top spokesperson were back to the usual things, blaming Democrats for the shooting attempt and calling for ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel — again — because of a joke he’d told about First Lady Melania Trump days before the shooting.
And now that Trump has repeatedly called for the White House Correspondents’ Association to reschedule and re-run the dinner, there can be no question about his motives for attending this time around.
