The president will address a smaller, heavily secured gathering Friday as his administration intensifies its legal and rhetorical attacks on journalists.
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Three months after an apparent assassination attempt on President Donald Trump threw the White House correspondents’ dinner into chaos, the president is set to address reporters at a slimmed-down redo of the event Friday, amid escalating attacks by his administration against journalists.
The fraught event was poised to put the president on the dais with reporters who have covered him aggressively, even as the administration has stepped up its legal pursuit of journalists who report on subjects that the White House views as national security threats.
Trump has offered mixed messages about his plans for a dinner that traditionally has involved presidents giving lighthearted speeches that poke fun at themselves and at the people who cover them.
When the dinner’s new date was announced last month, he wrote on social media, “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out. In any event, it will be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”
Media critics have long questioned the White House correspondents’ dinner, which was first held in 1921, saying that it is an overly cozy moment of socializing between the president and reporters who cover the White House. Trump skipped the event during his first term, and the choice of entertainers at the dinner, some of whom offered sharp attacks on the president, became a lightning rod.
The dissonance may be especially sharp this year given Trump’s recent attacks on the press. The Society of Professional Journalists called this week for the White House Correspondents’ Association to use the dinner to condemn the Trump administration’s attacks on journalists.
“We believe it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it,” the group said in an open letter.
Trump never delivered the speech he planned for the April 25 dinner at the Washington Hilton before it was interrupted by a gunman who attempted to storm the basement ballroom where the dinner was being held. Cole Tomas Allen, 31, has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president, and an FBI special agent said in an affidavit that Allen had set an email to be sent to friends and family with “targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”
“The president looks forward to finishing what he started,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday, saying the dinner “promises to be a very entertaining and memorable evening.”
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Security is set to be high for the event, which is being held at the Waldorf Astoria in downtown Washington. Trump’s family company operated that venue as the Trump International Hotel during the president’s first term, then sold their lease on the property in 2022 for $375 million.
The guest list has shrunk to fewer than 700, a stripped-down affair with attendees including mostly just the journalists who cover the president, rather than the more than 2,500 — including government officials, political operatives and mostly B-list celebrities — who attended in April.
But many of the original tensions remain.
In the hours following the April shooting, Trump was unusually conciliatory toward reporters, making an appearance in the White House briefing room still dressed in his tuxedo as he took questions from many of the reporters who had been at the dinner earlier in the evening.
But that tone dissipated by the next day, when he called CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell “a disgrace” after she read excerpts from the alleged gunman’s manifesto to him.
Since then, his administration has returned to attacks on the press.
Trump last week called for stripping broadcast licenses from networks that didn’t air his prime-time speech about election integrity. And the Justice Department this month issued subpoenas to New York Times journalists who had reported on security concerns surrounding the luxury Boeing 747 that the Qatari government gifted for use as Air Force One, seeking their phone records in pursuit of leaks.
The subpoenas were dropped Thursday following a federal judge’s withering questioning of Justice Department officials, who vowed to press ahead with their investigation into the sources of the story.
One element of the dinner will be consistent with April: Entertainer and magician Oz Pearlman is once again on the program, a selection that sidesteps the politics of humor.
The dinner’s main organizer, CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang, who completed her term as president of the correspondents’ association earlier this month, said she wanted to keep the focus of the dinner on a celebration of press freedom amid the country’s 250th birthday celebrations.
“We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word, especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for,” Jiang wrote in a letter last month announcing the new dinner.
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