Comedy is off the menu at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, a once convivial get-together for reporters to meet with federal governments officials that has become too fraught for light-heartedness amid the second Donald Trump presidency.
The dinner, scheduled for 26 April, is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), and it typically features a post-meal comedic interlude during which a comedian sets to work on the powerful. Beginning with Calvin Coolidge in 1924, every president has attended at least one WHCA dinner – except for Trump.
But this year, the WHCA, already at war with the White House over some news outlets’ restricted access to Air Force One and the Oval Office, selected Amber Ruffin, a Nebraska comedian known for mixing her humor with song-and-dance routines – and for frequently criticizing the Trump administration.
The White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich attacked the association for planning to spotlight Ruffin, opening a new front in a conflict between the president and the press that began when the administration said it – not the press association – would now organize the rotating pool of news media members covering the president.
On Saturday, the WHCA announced it was dropping Ruffin’s comedic performance so the event’s “focus is not on the politics of division” but rather on honoring the work of the group’s journalists, according to the association president, Eugene Daniels.
The decision essentially left the WHCA friendless. Budowich slammed the scrapping of Ruffin’s performance, labeling it a “cop out” and calling the entertainer “hate-filled”. He said it was “so sad that such a storied and consequential group has been so quickly driven into irrelevancy”.
But others saw the WHCA’s decision as further evidence that the press, at large, has become too willing to bend to the administration’s wishes, especially after a series of media company settlements in seemingly winnable defamation cases as well as ongoing efforts by the White House to defund government-backed news outlets, including Voice of America.
Ruffin, an Emmy- and Tony-nominated comedian, began her career as a writer for NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, a US talkshow with a stronger political bent than most. She recently joked about a dispute between the White House and the Associated Press over Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America – a conflict that got the AP booted from the presidential plane and the Oval Office.
“I was like ‘What! Now you care about deadnaming?’” Ruffin said, to laughs, a reference to the hostility that many conservatives aim at people who are transgender.
Trump has a conflicted history with the association dinner. In 2011, then-president Barack Obama turned his comedic spotlight on Trump, who was in the audience, over Trump’s preoccupation with Obama’s birth certificate. Obama called the would-be president “The Donald” and said he should get back to issues that matter, “like did we fake the moon landing?”
Trump won his first presidency five years later.
The dinner itself has long come under scrutiny, with some questioning if a lavish, jovial get-together between the press and the government, who are highly co-dependent but have opposing interests, should be happening in the first place.
The Hill decided to opt out of the dinner after the comedian Michelle Wolf delivered a routine that the outlet’s chair, James Finkelstein, found “offensive” and “vulgar”.
“There’s simply no reason for us to participate in something that casts our profession in a poor light,” he said.
False kinship, elevated hostility, traffic in jobs between media and government, and other aspects of the relationship raise ethical questions for both.
For instance, some have seen the recent scandal surrounding the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s addition to a group chat on Signal in which Trump cabinet members were discussing plans of a military strike as a journalistic coup. But others have questioned whether a journalist being inadvertently added to such a group – as was the case in what is being called Signalgate – could illustrate how close relationships between press and government members can get.
Other matters which thrust the correspondents dinner under review include the Trump administration’s restrictions on mainstream media access to defence department press cubicles as well as the president’s habit of asking where reporters work – and ignoring those whose employers displease him.
The Washington Post recently questioned if the conflicts were contributing to a loss of appetite for the top-ticket, meet-and-greet event. A White House press veteran told the outlet that there was a growing sentiment that it should be scrapped.
“It’s been a bad idea for a long time. It’s even more of a bad idea at this point,” the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, told the outlet. The Times has long opted out of the dinner.
An unnamed White House reporter also told the Post that the dinner had “never has looked great, but now especially, are we really going to be mingling in our tuxes and our ball gowns with members of an administration that is curtailing press access”.
Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, told the Post reporters would be better off simply calling sources and filing Freedom of Information Act requests. He said: “Why be around powerful people if the only way they’re using their power is to lie to the public and to demean your profession and to undermine the amendment in the constitution that your profession is built around?”
