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Washington, DC \u2013<\/strong> Donald Trump \u2014 whose political career has been built, in part, on deriding the United States press \u2014 is set to attend his first White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner as president.<\/p>\n Saturday\u2019s event continues a decades-long tradition, dating back to 1921. Still, the black-tie gala held in Washington, DC, remains a divisive event.<\/p>\n list of 3 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n For years, detractors have argued its chummy approach to the presidency risks blurring the independence of the press corps.<\/p>\n Trump himself is one of the dinner\u2019s critics. Until this year, Trump had refused to attend, appearing poised to defy a tradition of sitting presidents dining at least once with the press corps during the annual event.<\/p>\n Since he launched his first presidential campaign, Trump has taken a bellicose approach towards the media, issuing both personal attacks on journalists and lawsuits against news organisations for coverage he deems unfair.<\/p>\n His presence at Saturday\u2019s dinner has only heightened questions about the event\u2019s role in the modern era.<\/p>\n Trump has previously declined five previous invitations to attend, across his first and second terms. His inaugural visit on Saturday has been accompanied by changes to the dinner\u2019s format: Most notably, the longstanding practice of having a comedian perform has been nixed.<\/p>\n Journalist organisations and rights groups, meanwhile, have called on the event\u2019s host, the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association (WHCA), to send a \u201cforthright message\u201d to the president about protecting the freedom of the press.<\/p>\n \u201cWe also urge the WHCA to reaffirm, without equivocation, that freedom of the press is not a partisan issue,\u201d a coalition of groups, including the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote in an open letter.<\/p>\n Saturday is set to be the first time Trump attends the correspondents\u2019 dinner as president, but it is not his first time attending the event.<\/p>\n He was present as a private citizen at the 2011 dinner, years before launching his first successful presidential campaign.<\/p>\n At the time, Trump had begun his foray into national politics, pushing the so-called \u201cbirtherism\u201d theory: the racist claim that then-President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and had faked his US birth certificate.<\/p>\n It is tradition for the sitting president to speak at the event, and Obama seized the moment to lob barbs at Trump\u2019s conspiracy theories and his nascent political career.<\/p>\n In one instance, Obama poked fun at Trump\u2019s work hosting the reality television show The Apprentice.<\/p>\n Referring to Trump\u2019s \u201cfiring\u201d of actor Gary Busey, Obama mockingly praised his decision-making. \u201cThese are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night,\u201d he quipped. \u201cWell played, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n Obama also envisioned what a future Trump presidency would look like, displaying a mock-up of a \u201cTrump White House Resort and Casino\u201d.<\/p>\n Comedian Seth Meyers, who hosted the night\u2019s event, also took aim at Trump\u2019s birtherism claims and political ambitions.<\/p>\n \u201cDonald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican,\u201d he quipped at one point, \u201cwhich is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a joke.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump sat stone-faced in the audience, with several confidants later crediting the night as a major motivator for his 2016 presidential bid.<\/p>\n The White House Correspondents\u2019 Association was launched in 1914, as a response to threats by then-President Woodrow Wilson to do away with presidential news conferences. The organisation has worked to expand White House access for reporters.<\/p>\n Comedians became mainstays of the annual dinner in the early 1980s, with both presidents and journalists often the subject of their pointed jokes.<\/p>\n Defenders of the event have argued that the presence of comedians helps to celebrate free speech and ground the black-tie proceedings, underscoring that no attendee is above ridicule.<\/p>\n But since President Trump first declined to attend the event after taking office in 2017, that norm has shifted.<\/p>\n Michelle Wolf\u2019s no-holds-barred performance in 2018 is often seen as a breaking point.<\/p>\n In her jokes, she seized upon Trump\u2019s past statements appearing to praise sexual assault, and she charged that Trump did not have a \u201cbig enough spine to attend\u201d the event. She also mocked the mainstream media\u2019s coverage of the president.<\/p>\n While praised by fellow comedians and some members of the press, her performance divided the White House press corps. Trump and his top officials took particular issue with the material, with the president decrying Wolf as \u201cfilthy\u201d.<\/p>\n The following year, the association instead invited historian Ron Chernow to speak at the event. The dinner did not have another comedian until 2022, during the administration of US President Joe Biden.<\/p>\n Last year, during Trump\u2019s first term back in office, the association abruptly cancelled a planned performance by comedian Amber Ruffin, with the board\u2019s then-President Eugene Daniels saying it wanted to avoid \u201cpolitics of division\u201d.<\/p>\n This year, a mentalist, Oz Pearlman, is set to perform instead of a comedian.<\/p>\n The Society of Professional Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and The National Association of Black Journalists are among the organisations and hundreds of individual journalists urging their colleagues to use the event to make a statement.<\/p>\n In an open letter, it said the actions by the Trump administration \u201crepresent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president\u201d.<\/p>\n The organisation pointed to a series of hostile actions the Trump administration has taken against journalists.<\/p>\n They include limiting the White House and Pentagon press pools, threats by the Federal Communications Commission against broadcasters, immigration enforcement actions against non-citizen journalists, and an FBI raid of a Washington Post reporter\u2019s home.<\/p>\n The letter also pointed to the White House\u2019s launching of a \u201chall of shame\u201d page on its website, which highlights news organisations accused of biased coverage, as well as Trump\u2019s repeated verbal attacks on reporters.<\/p>\n But the Trump administration has rejected allegations that it treats journalists unfairly or that it has prevented public access to information.<\/p>\n White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, for example, has regularly touted Trump as the \u201cmost transparent\u201d president in US history, pointing to his regular media events.<\/p>\n During his second term, Trump has also taken spur-of-the-moment phone interviews from reporters, even amid the US-Israeli war in Iran.<\/p>\n In their letter, the journalists and professional organisations note that some attendees on Saturday plan to wear pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins with the words \u201cFirst Amendment\u201d.<\/p>\n The pins reference the section of the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.<\/p>\n But the journalists called on the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association to go further and make it clear that it will not \u201cnormalise\u201d Trump\u2019s behaviour \u2014 \u201cbut instead fight back against any officeholder who has waged systematic war against the journalists whose work the dinner celebrates\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Washington, DC \u2013 Donald Trump \u2014 whose political career has been built, in part, on deriding the United States press \u2014 is set to attend his first White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner as president. Saturday\u2019s event continues a decades-long tradition, dating back to 1921. Still, the black-tie gala held in Washington, DC, remains a divisive event. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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