You may be surprised to learn that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will attend a charity dinner Thursday night, where they’re expected to give humorous speeches roasting each other.
Watch live: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump roast each other at the Al Smith dinner
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
But that is indeed what appears to be happening! The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner is underway, and Clinton and Trump are expected to each give their speeches some time after 8:50 pm Eastern. We’ve embedded a live stream above courtesy of NBC News.
The event has the potential to be incredibly awkward, given how nasty this campaign has gotten, and given Donald Trump’s well-known inability to laugh at himself. (Indeed, by some accounts, the roasting President Barack Obama gave Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner was a key factor in driving him to run for president this year.)
Yet Trump and Clinton are seated in the second row from the front with only one person — Cardinal Timothy Dolan — in between them. Trump is also seated next to his wife Melania, and Clinton is next to Al Smith IV, great-grandson of the dinner’s namesake, former New York Gov. Al Smith. (If the camera’s zoomed out, look for Clinton’s purple outfit to find them.)
