The White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) will hold its annual dinner on April 26. As is customary, the association invited a noted comedian to roast the current president and make fun of politicians from both sides.
That's the way it used to be, anyway.
Past hosts included Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, George Carlin, and George Burns, among other old-timers. In 1964, the Smothers Brothers reportedly made Lyndon Johnson laugh so hard that he lost control of his bladder.
The point is that there was an effort to be evenhanded in making fun of both parties. It was a prerequisite to being invited if you were a comic.
In recent years, that hasn't been the case. Since at least 2006, when Stephen Colbert performed his right-wing parody character, and several George Bush staffers walked out, the performances have left out making fun of the left and viciously attacked conservatives.
Eugene Daniels, the president of the WHCA, was excited about this year's invited comic.
Was so excited to announce that @ambermruffin is going to be the featured enterainer for the WHCD this year!
— Eugene Daniels (@EugeneDaniels2) February 4, 2025
The countdown has begun!
pic.twitter.com/2uLd07DLMm
Who is Amber Ruffin? She hosted her own late-night show on the streaming service Peacock and is a writer for "Late Night with Seth Meyers." I don't know how this recommends her for a prime comedic gig.
At any rate, Daniels should have done a little more research. Ruffin appeared on the Daily Beast podcast and immediately proved why she might be ready for an underground sex club, but not for the stage of the WHCA dinner.
On Thursday, Amber Ruffin sparked MAGA outrage when she said that she wouldn’t try to make sure that her jokes targeted both sides of the political spectrum during her set, as she had been instructed to do by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA).
She told hosts comedian Samantha Bee and Beast Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles that the Trump administration are “kind of a bunch of murderers,” adding that playing to both sides “makes them feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way, ‘cause they’re not.”
Charming.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich was livid.
This year’s @whca dinner will be hosted by a 2nd rate comedian who is previewing the event by calling this administration “murderers” who want to “feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way, because you’re not”
— Taylor Budowich (@Taylor47) March 29, 2025
What kind of responsible, sensible journalist… pic.twitter.com/tZCJS9fNOT
Daniels tried to backtrack by changing the format for the dinner, nixing the comedic performance altogether.
He wrote in a Saturday email: “The WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year." He added that the event’s “focus is not on the politics of division” but on honoring the association’s journalists.
Budowich was unimpressed at Daniels' move.
“No accountability at WHCA, just a cop out statement—pathetic!” Budowich wrote on X, attacking Daniels and adding it was “so sad that such a storied and consequential group has been so quickly driven into irrelevancy.”
Daniels claimed he was “re-envisioning” the dinner “for the past couple of weeks.” You wouldn't have to win a Pulitzer to know what kind of "comedian" Ruffin was. That she was invited in the first place was a travesty.
The WHCA and the White House have been at war as Trump, like every president, seeks to shape news coverage.
In February, the White House announced that the WHCA would no longer be allowed to decide which journalists were assigned to cover the president on a given day. The White House itself now assigns reporters to the pool, which has raised concerns about the opportunity for the press to cover the administration without fear of retribution.
Daniels said at the time that the decision “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”
The same month, Trump moved to exclude the Associated Press from press events after the international news agency decided to stick with the name the “Gulf of Mexico” rather than, as Trump has tried to rename it, the “Gulf of America.”
Trump figured the media was going to go for the jugular anyway, so why pretend that anything he did would placate them?
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