President Donald Trump at White House Correspondents Association dinner on July 25, 2026
One month ago, the White House Correspondents Association gathered for its annual “dinner that celebrates the First Amendment” with President Donald Trump.
Journalists assembled in Washington, D.C., sat impotently as the president delivered remarks that mixed empty platitudes about his “respect for your profession” with withering insults directed at individual reporters. The evening “was a public humiliation for the White House Correspondents’ Association” that “left the association looking naïve about its decision to invite the man who has spent years using both his personal and government means to wage war against the free press and its ability to report on his actions,” Status’ Jon Passantino wrote.
Trump’s behavior was extremely predictable given his long record of vitriolic attacks on journalists and news outlets — not to mention his administration’s frequent use of state power to try to cudgel them into line. And the president’s long war on free speech and the free press has continued without pause since he broke bread with reporters at the Waldorf Astoria on July 24.
Since then:
- The Washington Post reported that Trump secretly left the old Air Force One jumbo jet on the tarmac in Turkey last month and used an alternate military transport to fly to Britain in response to an Iranian assassination threat, effectively turning into a “decoy” the plane that carried top aides — and the unwitting press corps. The WHCA subsequently asked the Trump administration to “work with us on a protocol for handling extraordinary security circumstances in the future.”
- Disney and ABC sued the Federal Communications Commission, saying it violated the First Amendment with its pretextual and retaliatory decision to order an unprecedented early review of Disney’s eight ABC station licenses. The FCC’s move came the day after Trump, who has frequently called for networks to lose their stations over coverage he dislikes, demanded that Disney and ABC “immediately fire” Jimmy Kimmel over a joke the late night host told on his ABC show.
- Trump’s personal lawyers threatened a $5 billion lawsuit against the Center for American Progress if the progressive think tank did not withdraw its report which found “no evidence that National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime.”
- The Defense Department fired the editor in chief and publisher of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that covers the U.S. military and is partially funded by the Pentagon but whose editorial independence is enshrined by statute. Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, said in a statement that according to the termination notice he received, “I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.”
None of this seems likely to convince the WHCA to change course, and it’s unclear what if anything Trump could do to the press that would result in the rescission of his invitation for next year’s dinner.
The organization’s leadership has moved from an employee of one pro-Trump media oligarch to another, with Weijia Jiang, senior White House correspondent for David Ellison’s CBS News, succeeded by Jacqui Heinrich, White House correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. And Heinrich told New York magazine earlier this month: “This dinner precedes President Trump. It will continue after President Trump. And we will invite the president no matter who the president is every year.”
“I thought it was valuable to have him taking part in a tradition that recognizes the importance of the free press,” Heinrich later added, without addressing who it might benefit or how. “And he’s already said he’s going to come next year. It’s going to be at the Hilton. If they want to complain about it, that’s fine, but it’s happening.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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