The Party’s Over: Why the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Flopped

The media shouldn’t yuk it up with a president who’s at war with the First Amendment.

A dangerous farce: Trump lashes out at the press at last week’s WHCA dinner / Image Credit: C-SPAN and ChatGPT

True confession: We have attended White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) Dinners in the past, and they can be inspiring and a lot of fun. The tradition, which began more than a century ago, started out with about 50 White House reporters—all men of course—sitting down to break bread with top presidential aides.

These days, more than 2,500 journalists, government officials, and even Hollywood stars cram into one huge hotel ballroom for an evening intended to celebrate freedom of the press and the First Amendment. Promising journalism students win coveted scholarships; journalists win awards for their reporting. It’s traditional to invite the president.

The event has been increasingly criticized by those who argue it undermines journalistic independence by presenting reporters as far too cozy with the government officials they report on. In fact, the New York Times stopped attending the dinners nearly 20 years ago for that very reason.

Now, this long-standing Washington tradition, as imperfect as it is, has reached a crisis point. How can an event designed to celebrate freedom of the press invite as its guest of honor the man who does everything to undermine it? But that’s exactly what the WHCA did. And President Trump, for the first time, agreed to attend.

Weijia Jiang, president of the WHCA, described the Association as a “bridge between the press corps and the administration.” But too often, under this administration, it is a one-way bridge from the White House to the press corps.

Let’s be clear: There has always been a natural tension between the Oval Office and the media. Richard Nixon included reporters on his secret enemies list and threatened the New York Times and Washington Post over the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Bill Clinton was furious over coverage of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Barack Obama aggressively went after government officials who leaked stories to journalists.

But what we are seeing with the Trump administration is an unrelenting and all-out assault on press freedom and a ceaseless attack on the First Amendment.

We have a president who verbally attacks journalists when he doesn’t like the questions asked, especially female reporters, whom he has called everything from “piggy” to “stupid” to “a horror show.”

We have an administration that tells Pentagon reporters that they must only report news that is cleared and released by the Defense Department as a condition for keeping their press credentials. That sounds more like Russia, China, and North Korea than America.

We have a president who habitually sues newspapers and broadcast networks for defamation. Unfortunately, in today’s world, the corporations that own those outlets often have business dealings before the government and many choose to capitulate under political pressure.

We have a president who urges federal agencies to go after comedians, television shows, networks, and individual journalists (and their relatives) whose content the administration doesn’t like.

And we have a president and administration that labels any news they don’t agree with as “fake news.”

So, what could possibly go wrong when the president is invited to this dinner? Plenty, as it turns out. This year’s WHCA dinner was originally scheduled for April. The event ended abruptly and horribly when a gunman breached security. The president wanted a do-over and the WHCA agreed, holding a much smaller and more secure dinner this past Friday night.

As former journalists, we have been sounding the alarm over the administration’s attacks on press freedom. In advance of the dinner, we circulated an open letter urging the Correspondents’ Association to “forcefully stand up for freedom of the press in front of the president, publicly defend the journalists he attacks, and vow to resist his administration’s concerted effort to undermine the First Amendment.” We called it “hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it.”

True to form, even as President Trump delivered a few conciliatory remarks at the dinner—saying he had “tremendous respect for the people in this room” and “for your profession”—he quickly revealed he was indeed the fox in the hen house. He threatened, insulted, and mocked journalists and revealed how little respect he has for them and the work they do.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins won an award for her coverage of the contentious February 2025 meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During his rambling hour-plus speech at the dinner, the president singled out Collins, saying of her reporting, “It’s a fake. She shouldn’t get the award.” He then moved on to his familiar misogynistic rant about the accomplished CNN anchor and reporter: “She’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles. I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile.’”

The assembled journalists sat in stunned silence. They shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s the kind of fraught evening we had predicted when we implored the WHCA to speak out against Trump’s attacks as he sat at the head table.

During her speech before the president took to the podium, Jiang, the Association president and also a White House correspondent for CBS News, told the president, “The First Amendment is a done deal” and that there is “an existential difference between criticizing the press and trying to undermine it.” Both are important messages. In this moment, what we needed was a very public and full-throated denunciation of the administration’s actions. We needed a vow to resist its efforts to undermine the First Amendment. That’s what we had hoped for and what the country deserves.

These are not normal times, and we cannot treat them as such. If the White House Correspondents Association believes that maintaining its bridge between reporters and the Trump administration is more important than taking on the forces that undermine press freedom at its signature dinner, then we must all speak out—former and current journalists, concerned citizens, in fact all Americans. We, the people, need to stand in unison in defense of freedom of the press and the First Amendment—two of the essential pillars of our democracy.

Ahead of the originally scheduled WHCA dinner in April, the authors co-wrote a petition opposing the administration’s anti-First Amendment actions, which collected more than 500 signatures.

This month, ahead of the re-scheduled dinner, they co-wrote another open letter calling on the White House Correspondents’ Association to “forcefully stand up for freedom of the press in front of the President, publicly defend the journalists he attacks, and vow to resist his administration’s concerted effort to undermine the First Amendment.”