President Donald Trump on Monday said he will attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, following his yearslong boycott of the event. File Photo by Annabelle Gordon/UPI | License Photo
For the first time as president, Donald Trump will attend the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner after boycotting the event during his first term and the first year of his second term in office.
Trump announced he would attend the April 25 event in a statement published on his Truth Social platform, saying he accepted the invitation “in honor of our Nation’s 250th Birthday.”
The annual awards ceremony and fundraising event for journalism scholarships goes back to the 1920s. With few exceptions, the sitting president attends the event. Since 1983, the dinner has adopted a roast-style format involving a comedian making jokes about the administration. The sitting president is also expected to give a humorous speech that often pokes fun at themselves and their political rivals.
“Will be fun!” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X in response to Trump’s announcement.
Trump, who has long campaigned against and insulted news outlets he views as hostile, has boycotted the event every year he has been president, which he referenced in the statement, explaining it was because “the Press was extraordinarily bad to me.”
Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has reshaped the press corps in ways more favorable to his administration, taking control of the press pool, punishing wire services over editorial decisions he dislikes, restricting their access and tightening rules for journalists in the West Wing.
The Trump administration also added a so-called new media seat for nontraditional outlets, some openly pro-Trump.
The White House Correspondents’ Association has been a vocal critic of these changes, accusing the administration of hindering the press corps’ ability to work and retaliating against news organizations it does not like.
“We are happy the president has accepted our invitation and look forward to hosting him,” Weijia Jiang, president of the association, said in a statement.
Though he has never attended as president, Trump attended before entering politics, most notably in 2011, when he was the butt of a joke from then-President Barack Obama, who commented on the New York real estate mogul’s amplification of the racist so-called birther conspiracy theory that wrongly claimed Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president.
The April 25’s dinner is being hosted at the Washington Hilton, with mentalist Oz Pearlman as the headline entertainer.
