The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner with President Donald Trump that was disrupted earlier this year when a gunman charged past Secret Service agents toward the event is scheduled to be re-held in a different, smaller and more secure venue Friday night.
Trump and a number of his top officials will again be on hand for the dinner, which was rescheduled after the April event ended in chaos. Trump is scheduled to speak.
“The president’s speech will be a combination of unifying yet vicious, and serious yet hilarious, all at the same time, if you can imagine that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News on Friday. “One thing I can assure you, it will be entertaining.”
A senior White House official told NBC News earlier this week that “it’s safe to say” that Trump will “briefly address” the April violence in his remarks. As of Tuesday, his team had not gone over the speech, but the official expected that the president would include some of the jokes written for the earlier dinner that he never got to deliver.
Trump said in April that he had been planning to tear into the press.
“I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said at the White House shortly after the dinner was evacuated. “I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”
The gala is being held at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria — formerly the Trump International Hotel — rather than the Washington Hilton, where the dinner had been held every year since 1972.
The change was made after prosecutors say a heavily armed man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, rushed through a security checkpoint in an apparent effort to make it to the ballroom where the event was being held.
Allen was arrested after allegedly exchanging gunfire with law enforcement. He has pleaded not guilty to numerous charges, including attempting to assassinate the president. Prosecutors allege that he had written a note to family members saying he was targeting administration officials.
A Secret Service officer who was shot in the attack, Victor Gonzales, will be presented an award at the dinner.
“Officer Gonzales played a significant role when he ran toward danger so that thousands of others could make it home safely. His courage stemmed from a dedication to service, which we are looking forward to honoring this week,” the WHCA said in a news release ahead of the dinner.
The association’s president, Weijia Jiang, told CSPAN that the program is “very much the same” as the original dinner back in April and will include entertainment by mentalist Oz Pearlman. “What will be different is the size. It’s a much more intimate gathering,” Jiang said.
The 700-person event space at the Waldorf is about a quarter of the size of the Washington Hilton ballroom, which holds over 3,000 people.
Among those scheduled to attend are Leavitt, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Some who attended the first dinner will not be at the second, including first lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The dinner is billed as a celebration of the First Amendment, but comes at a particularly fraught time in relations between the White House and the media.
The president has repeatedly suggested that media outlets that have written critically about the U.S. war with Iran should be charged with “treason,” has called the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” has repeatedly berated individual reporters for asking questions he doesn’t like, and has filed a number of personal lawsuits against media outlets in recent years, including actions against The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC and CBS.
In January, the FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized her phone, laptops and other materials in a leak investigation.
The Justice Department also recently subpoenaed a number of New York Times journalists in a separate leak investigation. The DOJ agreed to withdraw those subpoenas this week after facing pushback from a federal judge.
A letter signed by hundreds of journalists ahead of the dinner urged the WHCA to use the event to call out the administration’s “egregious” actions.
“We believe it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it,” the letter said. “We urge the WHCA to condemn the administration’s actions from the podium and pledge to fight all attempts by his administration to undermine this core pillar of a functioning democracy.”
The administration, meanwhile, has blamed the media for the rise of political violence in the country. Blanche, who signed off on the subpoenas against the Times, suggested in April that the media’s “rhetoric” was partly to blame for the violence at the dinner.
“Many people in this room, if we’re going to be honest about it, have done it,” Blanche said to a room full of reporters. “They’re just as guilty as a lot of people on X when you have reporters, when you have media, media just being overly critical and calling the president horrible names for no reason and without evidence, without proof.”
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