President Trump’s performance at last Friday’s retooled White House Correspondents’ Dinner made me nostalgic for the days of Vice President Spiro Agnew, President Richard Nixon’s media attack dog. In a speech, Agnew called politicians critical of Nixon administration policies “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a phrase written by his speechwriter William Safire, and later usurped by media to apply to journalists. H e compared the “really beat-up faces” of UFC fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen. As The New York Times put it: “The president wasn’t telling jokes so much as he was repeating attack lines one hears at a standard MAGA rally.” Look up their remarks at previous White House Correspondents’ dinners on YouTube.