At the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner at the Washington Hilton on the night of Apr. 25, gunfire erupted and President Donald Trump was rushed out by Secret Service agents, bringing renewed attention to Trump's fraught history with the dinner.
Trump's ill-fated relationship with the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) dinner goes back 15 years to 2011. Then a real estate mogul and host of the NBC reality show "The Apprentice," Trump was publicly spreading the "birther" conspiracy theory questioning then-President Barack Obama's birthplace while floating the possibility of running for the Republican presidential nomination. But the conspiracy theory effectively collapsed when the state of Hawaii released Obama's original birth certificate a few days before the dinner.
On Apr. 30, at a WHCA dinner also held at a Washington hotel, President Obama took direct aim at Trump from the rostrum. "Donald Trump is here tonight. No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than Donald," Obama said with a jab. "Now he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like whether we faked the moon landing or what really happened in Roswell."
Comedian Seth Meyers also took the stage and mocked, "Donald Trump is running for president as a Republican. I assumed he was running as a joke." The broadcast camera caught Trump with a stony expression. NBC News reported that Trump left that night feeling humiliated.
That scene later hardened into the political narrative of "the night Trump decided to enter politics." The Washington Post (WP) analyzed that the barbs from Obama and Meyers at the dinner created a political narrative that continues to this day.
Trump himself consistently denied that interpretation. In a 2016 interview with the Washington Post, he said, "I have many reasons for running, but that's not one of them." On Fox News' "The Five" this year, he said, "Obama hit me a little bit at the time, but it was actually very good and I enjoyed it." Experts said the 2011 dinner should be viewed less as Trump's motive to run and more as a symbolic scene of the political myth that later carried him to the presidency.
What is clear is that Trump turned his back on the WHCA dinner throughout his term. During his first four-year term, he did not attend the dinner even once. Since President Calvin Coolidge first took the rostrum in 1924, Trump was the first sitting president never to show up. In 2017, he skipped it, saying he did not want to "spend time with fake news media," and in 2018, comedian Michelle Wolf directly mocked White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, chilling the atmosphere. In 2019, Trump called it "boring and negative" and redirected his schedule to a rally in Wisconsin. In 2025, the first year of his second term, Trump again did not appear at the dinner.
This year, Trump reversed course. Last month on Truth Social, he wrote, "Since the so-called 'reporters' have finally acknowledged that I am one of the greatest presidents in American history, the GOAT, I am honored to accept their invitation as we mark the 250th anniversary of America's founding." The WHCA responded, "We will be happy to welcome him." But more than 200 former journalists, including Dan Rather, Sam Donaldson and Ann Curry, sent an open letter to the WHCA calling for a protest over "the most systematic and widespread assault on press freedom carried out by a sitting president."
After the shooting, Trump wrote on Truth Social, "In the end, we will have to do this event once again," adding, "I have concluded discussions with the event organizers, and we have agreed on rescheduling within 30 days."