When guests arrive for the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Friday at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, security will be much tighter, the guest list smaller, the partying pared down.
That much, the correspondents’ association can control.
What remains out of its control — and perhaps the biggest question — is what the dinner’s most prominent guest, President Donald Trump, will bring to the table.
Call it White House Dinner 2.0, or Take Two, or, in Trump’s own words, a “HOT ticket.”
The big unknown is whether Trump will bring the fighting words (“rather nasty,” he said) against the press 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.
“The president looks forward to finishing what he started,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday, confirming Trump’s attendance. “I encourage everyone watching tomorrow night to tune in for what promises to be a very entertaining and memorable evening.”
As for Trump himself, he indicated last month he wasn’t sure. “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out,” the Republican president wrote on his Truth Social platform. “In any event, it will be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”
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Besides the pared-down approach, there is another change at Friday’s dinner: two additional awards. One will be 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 so that thousands of others could make it home safely,” Weijia Jiang, WHCA president, said in a statement. “His courage stemmed from a dedication to service, which we are looking forward to honoring this week.”
A second award will be presented to the staff of the Washington Hilton hotel, site of the first dinner.
Jiang and her fellow board members worked hard to bring about a WHCA dinner 2.0, not wanting to let a violent act remain the final image. 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.”
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“We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word, especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for,” Jiang said.
But it’s also clear that some people feel the dinner should not be rescheduled at all.
Many never felt the dinner was a good look in the first place, with the sight of journalists in formal wear cozying up to their sources, or the objects of their reporting.
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“It undermines the public faith in how the press does its work, and it makes it look like we are pals with the people we cover,” Kelly McBride, an ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, said when the deliberations were taking place.
The 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 is unhappy with in a variety 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 latest example reaching a New York courtroom on Thursday. There, criticized by a federal judge for sloppy legal work, the government withdrew subpoenas that would have compelled three New York Times reporters to testify about their sources for articles about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet.
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That escalation was the impetus behind a letter from a coalition of press freedom groups and hundreds of former journalists, urging the WHCA to stand up to Trump forcefully at the dinner.
“We believe it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it,” the letter says. “We urge the WHCA to condemn the administration’s actions from the podium and pledge to fight all attempts by his administration to undermine this core pillar of a functioning democracy.”
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Jocelyn Noveck covers the intersection of media and entertainment for The Associated Press.
