The president wanted nothing to do with it.
It was Saturday night in Washington, and many of the town’s top reporters, editors and television anchors were gathered in the subbasement of a Hyatt hotel. They were there for the annual white-tie dinner thrown by the Gridiron Club, an association of journalists that was formed in 1885. Ordinarily, presidents go with high-ranking members of their administration. It’s a chance for politicians and the press to toast and lightly roast one another (“singe, not burn” is the club’s motto). It is a clubby and cozy affair. This year it seemed curdled.
“I invited the president, the vice president, the national security adviser and the interior secretary,” said Judy Woodruff of PBS News, who is the club’s president. “All declined.”
“I was told the secretary of state would not be available,” she added.
Mr. Trump’s absence — and that of any members of his inner circle — was yet the latest reminder in a long string of them that, this go-round as president, he has no intentions of wooing the Washington establishment or playing any of its games. He barely wanted to play the first time he was here, but there were some small efforts on his part back then. He did go to the Gridiron dinner in 2018, and his daughter Ivanka went as an emissary the next year.
The Gridiron Club had been trying in vain for weeks to lure members of his cabinet to Saturday’s dinner. Only one showed up: Scott Turner, the secretary of housing and urban development. Margaret Brennan of CBS News joked that Mr. Turner was “whatever the opposite of designated survivor is.”
Once word spread that the president and his entourage were staying away, Republicans who had initially planned to attend, like Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign managers, and Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, bailed on the event. Those who did show up seemed to regret it. Daniel Driscoll, the Army secretary, walked out during a joke about Vice President JD Vance.
One White House official who skipped the dinner privately dismissed the club and its members as exactly the kinds of elites Mr. Trump’s base sent him to Washington to destroy.
So maybe “singe, not burn” was never going to be possible at a time when a chain-saw-wielding billionaire has been set loose by the president to tear up the town. Everyone is so far in their own corner that the idea that they could come together for a power kumbaya complete with song-and-dance numbers seemed faintly absurd.
There were skits and bits about the fecklessness of Democrats, Elon Musk’s turn toward the far right, and the supposed populism of the Ivy-league educated vice president and his wife. A rather pungent Chilean sea bass was served up to big fish, including David M. Rubenstein, the private equity billionaire who was head of the Kennedy Center until Mr. Trump tossed him out; Evan Osnos of The New Yorker; Peter Mandelson, the lordly new British ambassador to the United States; the Democratic battle ax James Carville; and Kaitlan Collins of CNN.
Many an acidic joke was told about Jeff Bezos’s proprietorship of The Washington Post and Will Lewis, the man he appointed as publisher. “As Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis always say, all good things must come to an end,” cracked Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic.
At one point, the banquet hall burst into applause for Ruth Marcus, the longtime Washington Post columnist who resigned from the paper last week over the continued meddling of Mr. Bezos and Mr. Lewis.
Mr. Bezos was at this dinner last year. So was President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his vice president, Kamala Harris.
There is usually a toast to the president, even if he’s not there, but that did not happen on Saturday. Ms. Woodruff said at the dinner that “we’re sorry that President Trump, Vice President Vance are not with us.”
But were they, really? It was tricky to tell why or whether the establishmentarians at the Hyatt actually wanted Mr. Trump to be there.
“It’s one of the norms of this town,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We are all supposed to coexist, not for the sake of bad banquet food but because that’s how a democracy stays unified.”
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Goldberg published an entire issue of The Atlantic detailing how “Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it.” Why would a person want to party with an existential threat to America — and, conversely, why would anybody want to party with the people calling them an existential threat?
“They really think they’re the first group of officials in Washington who’ve been criticized by the press?” Mr. Goldberg asked. “They’re not that naïve. That’s the point — you do things you don’t want to do in Washington for the larger cause, which is keeping a country that could fragment together.”
It was easy to imagine why Mr. Trump stayed away. He is always in touch with (and often fomenting) the fury of the public, and the only thing the public hates more than Washington itself may be the news outlets that cover it. It is simply good politics for him to have this group of people as a foil. Also, his flame war against the press is no joke. The lawsuits and the bans and the intimidation tactics and the Moscow-like chill that has descended over the news media do not exactly make for zinging laugh lines.
The Gridiron Club played a video at the dinner showing Mr. Trump’s appearance there in 2018, one year into his first term. It was fascinating to see how self-deprecating and game he had been then, even if it was just for one night.
Mr. Trump has something this time that he did not have then: his own establishment. The members of that counter-establishment have their own rituals and redoubts. Some of the cabinet secretaries who snubbed the Gridiron Club can be found night after night at The Ned, an exclusive, members-only club near the White House. Trumpian youngsters have their own clubhouse on Capitol Hill called Butterworth’s. MAGA billionaires have bought up mansions in the good parts of town and have their own dinner parties. As for balls and banquet halls? Well, that’s what Mar-a-Lago is for.
There is a tiny formal wear shop tucked away on a side street in Georgetown called Scogna. It is where official Washington types go to rent their white tie and tails and tuxedos for their springtime establishment traditions. A 75-year-old man named Ismet Dil has looked after the shop for decades. He was in there the day before the Gridiron dinner. Business was as slow as it had ever been.
“This year is a bit sad,” Mr. Dil said.