On Monday evening, President Donald Trump said he will attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on April 25, the first time he has done so as president. Trump made the announcement in a post on his social media site, saying the White House Correspondents’ Association asked him to be the Honoree at the event.
In his post, Trump said it would be “my Honor to accept their invitation,” and he linked the invitation to broader celebrations marking America’s 250th birthday. The dinner is scheduled for a date that falls after prior presidential terms in which Trump did not attend the gathering.
The announcement also represents a change from how Trump approached the event during his earlier time in office. The association’s dinner was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, and President Joe Biden attended each of the dinners during the final three years of his term. Trump, however, did not attend the dinner during his first term and skipped the last gathering, according to the account provided in the AP report.
Trump also described his reasons for not attending in his first term, writing that “Because the Press was extraordinarily bad to me” he had “boycotted the event, and never went.” In the same post, he said he was looking forward to attending this year, adding, “Hopefully, it will be something very Special.”
Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said in a statement that the association is “happy the president has accepted our invitation and look[s] forward to hosting him.” Jiang’s remarks framed the dinner as a long-running tradition, connected to the association’s history with presidents.
Trump’s planned attendance comes against a backdrop of presidential participation that has generally included most commanders in chief. The dinner began in 1921, and AP reported that then-President Calvin Coolidge became the first president to attend. It also reported that every president had attended at some point except Trump, until now.
AP reported that Trump has attended the correspondents’ dinner before becoming president, including a 2011 appearance that drew mocking from then-President Barack Obama. In a reference to that earlier event, AP recounted an Obama joke that credited Trump with bringing “some change to the White House,” followed by remarks on what “we’ve got up there.”
The AP report said Trump told reporters as he returned from a weekend at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday that he had noticed new statues near the Rose Garden, including those of Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, that were erected while he was away. Trump said, “Unbelievable statues. Come and look at them,” as reporters were nearby, according to the report.