Log in
In a truly inspiring display of speaking tiny, baby-voiced mewls to power, the White House Correspondents Association has announced that it’s dumping previously announced comedian Amber Ruffin from its upcoming White House Correspondents Dinner. Although the letter announcing the decision, from WHCA President Eugene Daniels, put a lot of emphasis on wanting “to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division,” these are not especially hard lines to read between: This is a pretty clear case of trying to court Donald Trump, who hates the Dinner, will never attend it, and also hates everything it represents—both journalistic freedom as a wider principle, and the more specific idea that it’s occasionally useful to have someone funny stand up on the national stage and tell some jokes about all the ways the people who run the country suck shit. Seems like a weird person to throw away a core part of your event’s identity to try to placate, but hey, what do we know?
For years, the WHCD has been one of the premiere political comedy gigs in America, a chance for the national spleen to get vented (and for sitting presidents to at least give lip service to the idea of having a sense of humor about themselves). Trump blew that precedent up during his first term in office, avoiding the event all four years of his original term, before Joe Biden resumed the tradition. Now, though, the WHCA is apparently in the mood to preemptively capitulate, announcing that it’s not only dumping Ruffin—whose political comedy knives got sharpened during a long tenure as a writer and frequent performer on Late Night With Seth Meyers, before helming The Amber Ruffin Show from 2020 to 2022—but the whole idea of having a comedian at the dinner at all. Instead, the focus will be “entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists,” i.e., those bits you idly checked your phone during while watching previous dinners on C-SPAN.
Per Deadline, there was no chance in hell that Trump was going to attend the Dinner anyway, with rumors circulating that some of his supporters are organizing a competing event that we’re sure will be an absolute laugh riot. Which brings us back to a question we keep asking every time some supposedly firm institution goes all pudding-spined in response to Trump’s second term: If you don’t even get anything for rolling over for him, what’s the point of kneeling at all? The White House Correspondents Dinner spent years building its reputation as a place where one of America’s key freedoms was lionized; now it’s just the place where bored journalists eat chicken and give each other awards while looking over their shoulders nervously to make sure Daddy’s not too mad.
The 2025 WHCD is scheduled for April 26.
