Karoline Leavitt Vows Trump’s Rescheduled WHCA Dinner Speech Will Be ‘Unifying, Yet Vicious’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised that President Donald Trump’s speech Friday night at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner would be “unifying, yet vicious.”

“The President’s speech will be a combination of unifying yet vicious, and serious yet hilarious, all at the same time, if you can imagine that,” Leavitt said. “One thing I can assure you, it will be entertaining.”

CNN played video of Trump’s comments after April’s dinner was nixed after a gunman opened fire in the lobby of the Washington Hilton:

I was all set to really rip it, and I said to my people, this would be the most inappropriate speech ever made if I said so, I’ll have to save it. I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight. I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time.

“But today’s new official White House preview, a quote ‘combination of unifying, yet vicious,'” CNN anchor Jim Sciutto said as he introduced media reporter Brian Stelter. “I mean, can you be unifying and vicious? I don’t get it.”

“I’ve never heard a speech where someone’s unifying and vicious. But maybe we will tonight,” Stelter said. “This is definitely not going to be a ‘kumbaya moment,’ though. There’s no way it can be, because the tension is inescapable. The push and pull between the president and the press. It’s always there, but it’s, of course, much more heightened during Trump 2.0. This is a president who wants attention but rejects accountability. And so it always goes downhill in one way or another.”

Stelter added: “Back in April, the president was briefly unifying after that shooting attempt. But the next day he tore into CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell and called the press ‘terrible people,’ so that unifying moment lasted less than 24 hours. I don’t expect anything different this time around.”

Stelter went on to give examples of the Trump administration’s assaults against the Fourth Estate, including the FCC challenging station licenses and staging investigations into media companies.

“American journalism is stronger than any demagogue,” he said. “The journalists keep working. The press is out there doing the work every day, but it has been adversely affected by the subpoenas, by the funding cuts, by the challenges of licenses, by that cloud of intimidation. So that is the environment for the speech tonight. And that’s why many outside critics say there should not be this dinner happening at all, that Trump should not be invited at all.”

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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