It was on full display Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner: The amusement Washington elites derive from watching ordinary, decent Americans struggle to survive.

High gas prices that are crippling American families? Hilarious. Absurdly expensive food? Hahaha.  Skyrocketing rents? LOL.

Worse, President Biden was caught on camera roaring with laughter as host Trevor Noah made jokes about the plight of the people. Surely this clip of the president and his pals in the media cracking up about Biden’s inflation will appear in every Republican political ad leading up to the mid-terms.

This annual dinner has been an embarrassing, cringe-inducing event for decades. The spectacle of those who cover the White House yukking it up with the subjects of their coverage and celebrities is unseemly. It undermines the illusion that news reporters are politically neutral.

They aren’t and everyone knows it.

These slobbering sycophants actually gave Joe Biden a standing O on Saturday.

In 2011, The New York Times wisely announced that their writers would no longer attend the dinner.

“…we came to the conclusion that it had evolved into a very odd, celebrity-driven event that made it look like the press and government all shuck their adversarial roles for one night of the year, sing together (literally, by the way) and have a grand old time cracking jokes,” explained then- Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet, who has since become executive editor of The Times. “It just feels like it sends the wrong signal to our readers and viewers, like we are all in it together and it is all a game. It feels uncomfortable.”

Few other outlets have followed suit.

Reporters - and I was one of them for 42 years -think highly of themselves and tend to worship celebrity. At heart, they’re a pack of fanboys and fangirls.

Given the choice of sitting home with their cats on a Saturday night and canoodling with the likes of Kim Kardashian, Pete Davidson, Brooke Shields, Drew Barrymore, Al Sharpton, Martha Stewart and Pat Sajak, they’ll go for the night out all the time.

Especially if it’s guaranteed to be a room full of lefties poking gentle fun at each other and saving the nasty stuff for Republicans.

Members of the press refer to the dinner as their “nerd prom” implying that they’re smart, nerdy people.

They aren't.

They’re lickspittles and lapdogs. They won’t be laughing in November if their sneering attitude toward the hoi polloi results in a red wave from sea to shining sea.