Jokes off the menu at White House Correspondents’ dinner

Every year the reporters who cover the White House hire a comedian to roast the president. Not this year.

Comedian Amber Ruffin in New York. Picture: Getty Images.

Every year for the past 40 years, with one or two exceptions, the club of reporters who cover the White House has hired a comedian to roast the president on a night meant to celebrate the freedom of the press.

This year, however, the jokes have been cancelled. A comedian had been announced in February, but over the weekend Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told members that “for the past couple of weeks, I have been planning a re-envisioning of our dinner tradition”.

The dinner he was envisioning still appeared likely to last four hours, he said, but there would be less in the way of laughter as the association’s board had “unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year”.

Relations have been souring between the Trump administration and the reporters’ association that has long managed the rotating pool of journalists given access to the Oval Office and to trips with the president on Air Force One.

In February, the White House said it would take over that job, picking the pool reporters for each event. It barred the Associated Press from the pool because the news agency had refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

The correspondents’ association, which has criticised these decisions as assaults on a free press, said that, “at this consequential moment for journalism”, its dinner would focus “not on the politics of division” but on the work of journalists and the drive to foster a new generation of reporters.

Although Daniels said he had spent weeks contemplating the change, the announcement was made days after the comedian who had been hired called the ­administration “a bunch of ­murderers”.

Amber Ruffin told the Daily Beast podcast that the association had told her to “be equal and make sure you give it to both sides”, adding: “There’s no way I’m going to be freaking doing that, dude. Under no circumstances.”

Ruffin, a comedian and writer who appears on an American version of Have I Got News for You, on CNN, said jokes about Donald Trump had hurt him and that people around him also “got their feelings hurt”.

She said: “They want that false equivalency that the media does ... It makes them feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way because they are not.”

Taylor Budowich, a White House deputy chief of staff, ­complained on X, saying: “What kind of responsible, sensible journalist would attend something like this?”

The Times