President Donald Trump addressed an enormous roomful of journalists Friday night at a correspondents’ dinner rescheduled from April after a shooting upended the primary edition. Said the president: “As I said three months ago, the show must go on.”
Trump entered the ballroom to polite applause, and was thanked for his support by White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS News. After dinner, he then sat through greater than an hour of awards presentations — including many for journalists who had done pointed stories about him and his administration in the course of the previous 12 months.
“Let’s do that again,” Jiang quipped, welcoming the gang. The White House press corps, she noted, “all the time has a follow-up.” Turning serious, she referred back to the trauma and confusion of the unique dinner in April.
“Tonight our message is that this: We’re back,” she said. “We won’t be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the ultimate word.”
The rescheduled dinner was going down within the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, a smaller venue that held only about 700 people. Guests entered via a single entrance, through two ID checks and past a detection dog, armed officers and security guards. There was no red carpet and no separate cocktail receptions preceding the dinner.
He was widely expected to bring the fighting words — “slightly nasty,” he said — against the press that he’d planned to deliver in April before the event descended into chaos when a gunman stormed a security checkpoint, forcing an evacuation of the room. But early in his speech, Trump signaled that he had scrapped his planned remarks and was going to deliver a combination of things.
“This is actually the most important group of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ people put together at one time,” the president said.
Trump has been coy about what he might say
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As for Trump himself, he indicated last month he wasn’t sure. “I don’t know whether or not I’ll give the identical slightly nasty statements, a minimum of because it concerns certain people, but we’ll soon discover,” the Republican president wrote on his Truth Social platform. “In any event, it would be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”
Besides the pared-down approach, there was one other change at Friday’s dinner: two additional awards. One presented to Victor Gonzales, the Secret Service agent who was staffing a security checkpoint in April and was struck in his protective vest.
“Officer Gonzales … ran toward danger in order that hundreds of others could make it home safely,” Weijia Jiang, WHCA president, said in an announcement. “His courage stemmed from a dedication to service, which we’re looking forward to honoring this week.”
A second award was to be presented to the staff of the Washington Hilton hotel, site of the primary dinner.
The dress code this time was a looser “black tie optional,” and dinner includes grilled peach and burrata salad, lobster and beef Wellington. The evening, as on the last dinner, had entertainment by mentalist Oz Pearlman, together with the awards presentations and Trump’s remarks.
Jiang and her fellow board members worked hard to bring about this WHCA dinner 2.0, not wanting to let a violent act — or the image of colleagues hiding under tables — remain the ultimate thought. Announcing the rescheduling, she emphasized the dinner’s stated purpose: “a celebration of a free press and the vital role of journalism in our democracy for over a century.”
“We won’t allow an act of violence to have the last word, especially during a 12 months after we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and every little thing we stand for,” Jiang said.
There’s still a number of criticism of the event
However it’s also clear that some people felt the dinner mustn’t be rescheduled in any respect.
Many never thought it was much of a very good look in the primary place, with the sight of journalists in formal wear cozying as much as their sources, or the objects of their reporting.
“It undermines the general public faith in how the press does its work, and it makes it appear to be we’re pals with the people we cover,” Kelly McBride, an ethics expert on the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, said when the deliberations were going down.
The brand new dinner comes during a time of fast-increasing tension between the media and a president who, in his second term, has tried to exert pressure on media outlets he’s unhappy with in quite a lot of ways. That pressure has ranged from sanctions against members of the White House press corps to regulatory actions through the Federal Communications Commission to outright lawsuits.
Those tensions have only escalated since April, with the most recent example reaching a Recent York courtroom on Thursday. There, criticized by a federal judge for sloppy legal work, the federal government withdrew subpoenas that will have compelled three Recent York Times reporters to testify about their sources for articles about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet.
That escalation was the impetus behind a letter from a coalition of press freedom groups and a whole bunch of former journalists, urging the WHCA to arise to Trump forcefully on the dinner.
“We consider it’s hypocritical to rejoice the First Amendment in front of the person who relentlessly attacks it,” the letter says. “We urge the WHCA to sentence the administration’s actions from the rostrum and pledge to fight all attempts by his administration to undermine this core pillar of a functioning democracy.”
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