President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will attend the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on July 24, nearly three months after the original event was cut short when a suspect fired a shotgun outside the venue. Trump was inside at the time. He and first lady Melania Trump were safely evacuated. The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, was charged with attempted assassination of the president and assault on a federal officer with a deadly weapon.
The dinner will now take place at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, a building the Trump Organization once developed and sold in 2022. Trump posted on Truth Social that WHCA president Weijia Jiang, a CBS News senior White House correspondent, asked him to attend and speak, and he accepted. Then came the kicker: “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people, but we will soon find out.”
The original event was Trump’s first appearance as president
This year’s dinner marked Trump’s first attendance at the annual gala as sitting president. His participation and the tone of his expected remarks were highly anticipated in Washington. Trump has a long history of maligning the media, and the correspondents’ dinner is traditionally a venue where presidents roast the press and the press roasts back.
Then a man with a shotgun stormed a security checkpoint outside the event, and the evening ended before Trump could deliver whatever remarks he had prepared. The dinner was postponed. The press got its story, just not the one anyone expected.
The rescheduled event will be smaller and more secure
In a letter to association members, Jiang said the decision to reschedule was not “automatic” and that the new event will feature “significantly enhanced safety measures and new access procedures.” She described it as a “more intimate gathering.” The association has raised funds to ensure that WHCA members who purchased tickets to the original dinner will not have to pay again if they attend the July event.
Jiang wrote that the rescheduled dinner will serve as “a statement that violence has no place in American life and a free press will not be intimidated into silence.” The annual gala has been a Washington fixture for more than a century, raising funds for journalism scholarships and celebrating the First Amendment.
Trump’s history with the correspondents’ dinner runs deep
In 2011, Trump attended the dinner as a real estate mogul and reality television star. President Barack Obama used his speech that year to roast Trump in front of the Washington press corps. Trump sat through it, stone-faced, while the room laughed. Many political observers later pointed to that night as a turning point.
Trump waited until this year to make his first appearance at the dinner as president. The original April 25 event was set to be his chance to respond, fifteen years later, with the power of the presidency behind him. Instead, the night ended in a security breach and federal charges against a suspect who allegedly tried to kill him.
What comes next
The July 24 dinner will now carry the weight of two stories: the assassination attempt that interrupted the first event, and the question of what Trump will actually say when he finally gets the microphone. His Truth Social post made clear that he knows everyone is wondering. He teased the possibility of delivering the same “nasty statements” he presumably prepared for April, but left the door open to a different approach.
The White House Correspondents’ Association has now committed to holding the dinner in a hotel Trump once owned, with enhanced security, a smaller guest list, and a president who has spent years attacking the press corps that invited him. Jiang’s letter framed the event as a statement about press freedom and resilience. Trump’s post framed it as a decision he’ll make closer to the date.
The question is whether Trump will use the rescheduled dinner to deliver the speech he prepared in April, or whether three months and a federal attempted assassination charge will have changed his calculation about what this particular room deserves to hear.
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