Cancel the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner

Allow me to make a confession: I’m a fan of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD). I have never been invited. I just enjoy the show. The president does a stand-up routine. The people who cover the president hire a famous comedian to roast him. It’s fun, both for those of us watching at home and for those in the Beltway who get a nice dinner at the same time. People should be allowed to have fun—good, clean, legal, ethical fun—including people who work at high-profile, high-stress jobs.

Eric Deggans, the media industry journalist who serves as critic-at-large for NPR, recently wrote a defense of his past attendance at the dinner on the grounds that it helped him with his job. “I always view such events as opportunities for source-building, vetting of coverage ideas and networking,” he argued, “I may be having fun with my colleagues from NPR, but I’m also low-key working my beat.” Sure, but you don’t need the WHCD to cover that beat, just like the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) doesn’t need to have an black-tie event with the president to fundraise for programs that, as its website explains, “educate the public about the value of the First Amendment and a free press, and scholarships to help the next generation of journalists.”

To the extent that we need the WHCD for anything, it’s so we can still live in a country with so much freedom of speech that comedians can mock the president right in front of his face. And at times the dinner has produced historically consequential moments, such as in 2006 when Stephen Colbert satirically scolded both George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the press corps timid coverage of it, and in 2011 when both Barack Obama and Seth Meyers lampooned the idea of Trump running for president, which some claim gave Trump the motivation to run in 2016 as revenge. But for the most part, the event, not-so-lovingly dubbed “Nerd Prom,” is just fun.

The Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride, a WHCD critic, contends the dinner’s stated goals “could be accomplished without the cringy optics of elevating journalists to the same elite status as the powerbrokers who run Washington, D.C., and the rest of the world.” I part ways with McBride’s last point. The dinner may be unnecessary from a fundraising standpoint, but it doesn’t confer a special gold-card status of eliteness shared by White House correspondents and occupants.

Neither do I buy McBride’s corollary argument that the dinner “puts journalists in the same comfortable class as those who, because of money and connections, can dodge the harsh realities of life faced by the masses.” Washington journalists who make a lot of money and run in influential circles (and, if I may stress, I am not describing myself!) did not achieve their station because of the dinner, and the demise of the dinner would not change their salaries nor their social circles. Moreover, journalists should not be obligated to live lean lives (though many do!) to perform their jobs.

Go to any capital city at a national or state level, and you will find government officials and journalists living in the same community, sending kids to the same schools, and attending some of the same social gatherings. As Deggans observes, “Washington, D.C. journalists often are running in the same circles as high-powered politicos. There are much lower profile parties where the same kind of crowds are gathering to have the same kinds of discussions about the state of politics and media.” Journalists have an ethical obligation not to let any personal interactions interfere with their reporting, but they should be judged on their reporting, not on their ability to avoid small talk at parties.

Where I side with McBride over Deggans is in opposition to the WHCA’s decision to continue inviting Donald Trump. A fundraising event to support “programs to educate the public and the value of the First Amendment and a free press” should not have a featured speaker who is the biggest peacetime threat to the First Amendment and a free press in American history.

McBride interviewed a WHCA member who claimed, “The dinner isn’t about the president, it’s about the press corps. If the president chooses to come, great, we’re happy to have a president come and help celebrate a free press.” McBride’s response hit the mark:

If that’s truly the case, then it would have been easy to simply stop inviting the president after Trump’s first term, [during which] he declined the invitation … If it wasn’t about the president, the White House Correspondents’ Association wouldn’t have disinvited comedian Amber Ruffin last year after she called the president and his cabinet “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast. Trump boycotted last year’s dinner anyway.

Moreover, the WHCA has reconfigured the event to make it more to Trump’s liking, chucking the comedian slot and, instead, naming as headliner Oz Pearlman, described by The New York Times as the “manosphere’s favorite magician.” Pearlman is a mentalist who creates the perception of mind-reading. Last year, the Times’ John Hendrickson interviewed Pearlman for a profile to learn more about his methods:

“What does a magician do?” he asked. “You shuffle the cards, you give them back to me, and I know where the aces are. Is that cheating? Absolutely that’s cheating. Am I doing it at a card table where it’s illegal? No.”

Mr. Pearlman argued that he relied on embellishment and “partial truths” to make his mentalism engaging — and to contour a participant’s memory of a miraculous event.

“In essence, all we’re doing is cheating,” he said of himself and his peers. “We’re using subterfuge, secret methods, ways to deceive you, right? But we’re doing it in an ethical way.”

A master of embellishment and partial truths is the perfect entertainment choice to venerate Donald Trump. But not the free press.

Deggans, sheepishly (“I know I’m probably too idealistic in my thinking,” he prefaced), made the case for inviting Trump:

From my perspective, the problem isn’t a tony dinner bringing together journalists and politicians, including a President who has often attacked the press. The challenge is making sure that what happens once the dinner starts isn’t about normalizing those attacks, but showing the President and other politicos the importance of a free press which scrupulously covers his administration, upholding democracy in the process.

Deggans is correct. He is too idealistic. There is nothing to be gained by “showing the President and other politicos the importance of a free press” when the president is exerting state control over the press. He has employed litigation and threats from the FCC chair to selectively apply the equal time rule and revoke broadcast licenses over their war coverage, and threats from himself to imprison war correspondents. He has openly sought to determine the ownership of CNN by meddling in the sale of CNN’s parent company. A federal judge has twice ruled that the Defense Department is unconstitutionally restricting press access to administration-friendly reporters. A nice speech about the First Amendment while Trump is on the dais won’t magically change his ways. (Though maybe Pearlman has a magic trick up his sleeve.)

Speaking of CNN, the network’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, is attending the dinner and has made a defense for going in his Reliable Sources newsletter. He interviewed the WHCA president and CBS White House correspondent Weijia Jiang. The arguments they made are both limp and revealing:

“I answer to my members,” she said. And none of them, Jiang said, have complained to her about Trump’s attendance at the dinner. Some view it as a positive development, given his past boycotts. Reporters “are looking forward to the president’s attendance,” Jiang said. “We cover the White House,” she added. “And when you cover any subject, you want to be around your subject.”

Some analysts have speculated that Trump accepted the invite this year to spike the football in front of a defeated press corps. No one knows how long he’ll talk or what he’ll say. However, there’s a strong counterargument that Trump’s attendance is a concession of sorts—an acknowledgment of the press corps’ enduring power.

Journalists selling this argument are either deluding themselves or gaslighting the rest of us. Trump attending a dinner that used to roast the president but now features hacky magic tricks is not him bowing to the press corps, but literally the opposite.

Stelter did tacitly challenge Jiang’s contention that White House reporters simply have a professional desire to “be around your subject.” He noted, “Trump is arguably even more accessible to the press corps in his second term, now that so many reporters have his cell phone number. But accessibility has rarely been the problem. Accuracy, consistency, decency — those have been the problems.” Yes, and it’s the White House press corps job to show how Trump is deliberately attacking the press’s credibility—“Fake news!”—to make it impossible for media consumers to know what’s accurate and what isn’t. Putting him on stage for a supposed celebration of the First Amendment further confuses the public and runs counter to that obligation.

Yet Stelter suggests that “to not [emphasis original] invite Trump would make the WHCA a political actor and likely weaken its efforts to keep open, productive lines of communication with the White House.” This is nonsense. Trump talks to White House reporters—and apparently anyone who calls his cell phone—because he loves talking to the press. One rescinded dinner invitation won’t change that. And if it did, so what? When a notoriously dishonest president clams up, that’s no great loss. Journalists still can pursue stories through other means—most likely with the help of his palace court of backstabbing leakers.

More than 250 journalists on Monday sent a letter to WHCA members and leaders urging them to make a strong statement at the dinner “from the podium” with a “forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom.” But unless such a statement names Donald Trump as one who deserves that condemnation, any such protest would miss the mark by a mile. His presence muddies any free-press message unless it’s held up as an example of the threat to a free press.

If the WHCA were willing to level a frontal challenge to Trump, that would be almost as much fun to watch as a good roast. So, the part of me that loves good TV would vote for that. But I can’t expect those covering the White House and aiming to do so neutrally and objectively to wage a provocative protest.

I am not a virulent critic of the White House press corps. I think many White House correspondents get a bad rap. I understand that they must maintain a degree of access to unearth what is happening behind the scenes, and we know a huge amount about what is happening because of their good work. Yet to go forward with the WHCD without any public naming of Trump’s free speech violations is whitewashing, making these correspondents accessories to his constitutional crimes.

The best course of action is to cancel the dinner. Offer ticketholders refunds but remind them their money goes to scholarships and educational programming. In all likelihood, the WHCA will get to keep most of that money without shouldering further shame.

I do not want to see the Nerd Prom canceled forever. But future WHCA boards should not invite Trump. Future featured guests should represent the values of the First Amendment, not subterfuge. And then someone needs to get me a ticket.

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