Since the annual tradition of Nerd Prom has still not been abandoned, I suppose we’ll all have to analyze it yet again. Just as with last year, President Trump opted not to go along with the spectacle, instead holding a competing rally in Washington Township, Michigan to pump up the base in advance of the midterms. Based on the videos coming out of the White House Correspondents Dinner he made the right call. This year’s event looks like it was an epic disaster.

Brian Stelter (who else) was quick to attack President Trump for not showing up at the WHCD. He described it as another opportunity for the President to “wage his war on the reporters who cover him.” Going by the available clips of the entertainment being offered there, Trump didn’t miss anything memorable.

And why would he show up when the featured “comic” was Michelle Wolf? I’m including the full video of her comments here in case you want to check any of it out, but it’s clear that Nerd Prom is having trouble attracting talent for the headline gig.

Even the Daily Beast was forced to admit that a significant part of the audience didn’t laugh at many of the “jokes” or participate in her game of “Trump so broke.”

From there, she went into a call-and-response segment of “Trump’s so broke.” “How broke is he?” in which only a fraction of the audience in attendance seemed willing to participate. The final punchline to that bit? “He had to borrow money from the Russians and now he’s compromised and susceptible to blackmail and possibly responsible for the collapse of the republic!”

“Trump is racist, though,” she continued. “He loves white nationalists, which is a weird term for a Nazi. Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling a pedophile a kid-friend. Or Harvey Weinstein a ladies’ man.”

Very little of this was funny. It was simply mean spirited and Wolf sounds as if she was told this was a competition to be as offensive as possible. Her jabs at the President were predictably rancid, but she did even worse when she went after Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sitting on the dias and having to put up with all of this garbage. Most of Wolf’s “jokes” about Sanders were making fun of her physical appearance. I seem to recall something about that not being suitable humor, particularly coming from another woman, but apparently, the “comedian” didn’t get that memo.

As I’ve written here in the past, it wouldn’t have mattered if the WHCD had managed to recruit one of the most brilliant comics working today to do the honors. This entire event is a gaudy insult to the country, and it was precisely the same when Obama was president. These are allegedly the journalists who are supposed to be acting as a responsible watchdog over the politicians running the nation. Seeing them gulping drinks and chomping on snacks, laughing it up with the same people they’re supposed to be reporting on does nothing to inspire confidence in the Fourth Estate.

It’s time to ditch this misbegotten spectacle. It wasn’t a good idea before Trump and, if anything, it’s a worse idea now.