{"id":18498,"date":"2026-04-20T19:20:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T19:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/18498\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T19:20:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T19:20:03","slug":"the-president-is-coming-to-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/18498\/","title":{"rendered":"The President Is Coming to the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"

The prospect of President Trump delivering a speech at this Saturday\u2019s White House Correspondents\u2019 Association black-tie dinner \u2014 the first time<\/a> he has not boycotted the event as commander in chief \u2014 has raised some uncomfortable questions within media and political circles.<\/p>\n

What sort of message will this president, who has sued, threatened and demonized the independent news media, deliver when handed a microphone in front of hundreds of the nation\u2019s most prominent journalists?<\/p>\n

How will the Correspondents\u2019 Association, whose mission is to support the First Amendment, respond to a president whose favorite form of speech is speech that is favorable toward him?<\/p>\n

And which C-SPAN close-up reaction shots of guests like Wolf Blitzer will turn into memes the next day?<\/p>\n

The televised dinner, held at the Washington Hilton, has been a cultural flashpoint before: Consider Stephen Colbert\u2019s filleting of George W. Bush in 2006, or Seth Meyers\u2019s 2011 riff on Mr. Trump\u2019s presidential ambitions.<\/p>\n

Usually, it\u2019s the entertainer who is the most anticipated speaker of the evening. This time, it\u2019s the president.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump, whose instinct for crowd work and note-perfect timing have drawn comparisons to the insult comic Don Rickles, will almost certainly take a few potshots. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on social media that the evening \u201cwill be fun!\u201d<\/p>\n

Melania Trump, the first lady, is also set to attend the dinner, according to the White House.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the Correspondents\u2019 Association said it was \u201chappy\u201d Mr. Trump accepted its invitation and was looking \u201cforward to hosting him.\u201d But the group is now facing outside pressure to deliver some kind of onstage rebuke.<\/p>\n

More than 250 former broadcast journalists, including Dan Rather, Ann Curry and Sam Donaldson, delivered a letter on Monday urging the dinner\u2019s organizers \u201cto forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump\u2019s efforts to trample freedom of the press.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not normal times,\u201d the letter reads, \u201cand this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Updated\u00a0<\/p>\n

April 20, 2026, 2:01 p.m. ET<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the 2024 election and then into his second term, Mr. Trump has sued ABC News, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among other news organizations. (ABC and CBS each paid $16 million to settle with the president; a judge recently dismissed Mr. Trump\u2019s suit against The Journal; The Times is fighting Mr. Trump in court.) He has also threatened to strip TV stations of their federal broadcast licenses because of what he deemed biased coverage.<\/p>\n

Ian Cameron, a former ABC News executive producer who organized the letter with another former ABC colleague, Lisa Stark, said that \u201cit\u2019s time to stand up and speak forcefully in front of the man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journalists and executives at many of the news organizations that have been sued or threatened by the president are still planning to attend Saturday\u2019s dinner, which is sold out. (Journalists at The Times report on the dinner as a Washington news event, but do not attend as guests.) <\/p>\n

Weijia Jiang, a CBS News correspondent who is the current president of the Correspondents\u2019 Association, said on Monday that the dinner \u201creinforces the importance of the First Amendment in our democracy.\u201d She added, \u201cOur choice to gather as journalists, newsmakers and the president in the same room is a reminder of what a free press means to this country and why it must endure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Typically, the dinner involves speeches by Washington journalists that frequently invoke the First Amendment, and the presentation of awards for notable White House coverage. One of this year\u2019s prizes will be presented to The Journal for its scoop about a lewd birthday card<\/a> that Mr. Trump appeared to write to the now-disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Mr. Trump denied the existence of the letter (which The Journal later published) and sued the newspaper, claiming the article was libelous; a judge dismissed the case<\/a> last week.<\/p>\n

During the years that Mr. Trump boycotted the dinner, many senior administration officials skipped the festivities, too. This year, cabinet members are expected to be out in force.<\/p>\n

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, accepted an invitation to sit with CBS News journalists. Mr. Hegseth has tried to bar independent journalists from reporting inside the Pentagon and recently compared the news media to the Pharisees, a vilified sect cited in the New Testament. (Other networks are keeping quiet for now about their dinner plans.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump has delivered roasts before, to varying effect. His speech in October 2024 at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner included raunchy punchlines about menstruation and infidelity, peppered with some expletives. There were groans in the room.<\/p>\n

In January, as president, Mr. Trump made a maiden appearance at the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, another elite station on Washington\u2019s black-tie circuit. He joked in his remarks that he was spending his Saturday night in a room with \u201cpeople I hate\u201d and threatened to sue his nominee for Federal Reserve chairman if he did not lower interest rates.<\/p>\n

This Saturday, the other featured dinner speaker is Oz Pearlman, the celebrity mentalist, who has promised to entertain the crowd with \u201cwonder, surprise and awe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump\u2019s speech could well induce a combination of all three.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The prospect of President Trump delivering a speech at this Saturday\u2019s White House Correspondents\u2019 Association black-tie dinner \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11264,11265,2206,8,9,3747,11262,11261,11263,11266,7,11259,11260],"class_list":{"0":"post-18498","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-dan","9":"tag-donaldson","10":"tag-freedom-of-the-press","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-news-and-news-media","14":"tag-oz","15":"tag-pearlman","16":"tag-rather","17":"tag-samuel-a","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-united-states-politics-and-government","20":"tag-white-house-correspondents-assn"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116438658104313250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}