The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, commonly known as the Al Smith Dinner, is an annual white-tie event in New York City to raise funds for Catholic charities that support children of various needs in the Archdiocese of New York.
Held at the historic Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the third Thursday of October, the dinner is organized by the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation in honor of Al Smith, who grew up in poverty and later became the governor of New York four times and was the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party as the Democratic nominee in the 1928 election.
Traditionally, in every presidential cycle, the Republican and Democratic candidates come together to give humorous speeches at the dinner. Exceptions were made in 1996, 2000, and 2004, when the foundation decided not to invite presidential candidates. The tradition began when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon attended the event in 1960.
The last time a Democrat candidate opted out of the event while a Republican nominee attended was in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan gave a speech without Walter Mondale in attendance.
The tradition will be broken this year.
Kamala Harris will not attend the dinner, choosing instead to campaign in an unspecified battleground state. Archdiocese spokesperson Joseph Zwilling said he hopes Harris changes her mind.
We are disappointed that she will not be with us, as this is an evening of unity and putting aside political differences in support of a good cause of helping women and children in need regardless of race, creed, or background. We hope she reconsiders.
I’d bet everything I own that Kamala would rather walk barefoot on broken glass.
While President Donald Trump and Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden attended the dinner in 2000, neither candidate took shots at the other despite the partisan intensity of the campaign.
Trump said at the dinner:
The essence of the Catholic faith, as Jesus Christ said in the gospel, ‘Everyone will know you are my disciples.’
Biden, who continually claims to be a “devout Catholic,” yet staunchly defends on-demand abortion, said:
Throughout my life of public service I’ve been guided by the tenets of Catholic social doctrine. ‘What you do to the least among us, you do to me.’
Anyway, What’s Up With Kamala?
“What’s up” with Kamala is what’s always up with Kamala.
While Joe Biden safely campaigned in his basement in 2020, in 2024 Harris declines real interviews with real journalists asking real questions out of fear that the fraud she is will be exposed even further than it already has been.
From her ridiculous word salads to rehearsed answers to questions that have zero to do with the substance of the questions, Harris and the Democrats desperately want to run out the clock between now and November 5, revealing as little about her real policies as they can get away with.
Then what? They won’t care, if she wins, she’ll be firmly entrenched in the Oval Office from where she’ll do her radical best to continue to destroy America as we’ve know it.
Fox News Digital asked the Trump campaign if the former president plans on attending the dinner but did not immediately hear back.
