WASHINGTON – President Obama scattered the barbs during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as he poked fun at White House races past and present, the Secret Service and Donald Trump.

Even the entrance to his speech Saturday night was part of his shtick. The president walked off stage just before he took the lectern with an alleged “hot mic,” making fun of getting caught last month on an open microphone with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

“What am I doing here,” he asks off stage. “I’m opening for Jimmy Kimmel and telling knock-knock jokes to Kim Kardashian.”

Once on stage, the president revisited last year’s dinner, which took place as Navy SEALS were dispatched to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

“Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals,” Obama said. Then a picture of real estate mogul Donald Trump appeared on the room’s television monitors. The president last year delivered a scathing roast of Trump, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination and claimed he had solved the “mystery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Four years ago, Obama recalled, he was locked in a tough primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton, now his secretary of state.

“She can’t stop drunk texting me from Cartagena,” he said, referring to their recent trip to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia, where Clinton was photographed drinking a beer and dancing.

This year, Obama is the incumbent, but the dinner was far from a campaign-free zone. The president pointed out his similarities with the presumed Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

“We both think of our wives as our better halves, and the American people agree to an insulting extent,” the president said.

Obama touched on serious themes as well, remembering the New York Times’ Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London who died while covering the uprising in Syria.

“Never forget that our country depends on you to help protect our freedom, our democracy and our way of life,” Obama said.

Then he returned to the lighter side: “I have to get the Secret Service home in time for their new curfew.”

Proceeds from the dinner go toward scholarships for aspiring journalists and awards for distinction in the profession.