Comedian Michelle Wolf quickly fired back at President Donald Trump after he attacked her performance at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, taking a jibe at his response to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Business Insider reported.
Taking to his favorite social media platform, the president cited that because “so-called comedian Michelle Wolf bombed so badly last year” that he would be breaking a decades-old tradition of having a comedian headline the event. He has instead chosen biographer Ron Chernow, the author behind the book on Alexander Hamilton that inspired the popular musical Hamilton .
Michelle Wolf fired back a response to the president not even two hours after he had tweeted out his criticism of her performance.
“I bet you’d be on my side if I had killed a journalist. #BeBest,” the comedian wrote back, appearing to use the first lady’s anti-bullying campaign slogan in her tweet. The response has garnered a whopping 144,000 likes and over 30,000 retweets in just nine hours.
Wolf’s tweet is a reference to President Trump’s response to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month. Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist living in the United States and wrote for the Washington Post .
While the CIA reportedly concluded with what the Washington Post noted was “high confidence” that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s killing, President Trump stood with Saudi Arabia, refusing to blame Crown Prince Mohammed for the death.
“Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event–maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said on Tuesday.
I bet you’d be on my side if I had killed a journalist. #BeBest https://t.co/bZ91Cg0QCr
— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) November 21, 2018
Trump hinted in his critical tweet that the switch in headliners would be a good start to reviving a “dying evening,” and even hinted at the possibility of attending next year’s event.
Wolf, on the other hand, responded to the decision negatively, calling the White House Correspondents’ Association–the organization of journalists that cover the White House–“cowards.”
The @whca are cowards. The media is complicit. And I couldn’t be prouder. https://t.co/OOIFGuZ731
— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) November 19, 2018
Wolf’s performance at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April touched on a number of subjects, including Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ appearance. During her routine, NBC reported that she compared Sanders to a character in the dystopian show The Handmaid’s Tale .
Her act received mixed reviews–some journalists criticized the performance and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s former president even issued a statement saying that Wolf’s monologue was “not in the spirit” of its mission. Still, many others applauded the set and defended her.
Wolf told NPR at the time that she did not have any regrets over the show she gave during the dinner.