How this year’s Correspondents’ Dinner became a celebration of capitulation

“Nerd Prom” isn’t the first to bend the knee to Trump. But it’s the first to hold a party for the principles it failed to uphold.

Even before Donald Trump turned “cancel culture” into a verb, the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was among the more difficult D.C. institutions to defend. The president, senior administration officials, journalists, and a flotilla of Hollywood celebrities, all donning black tie to trade jokes and tell each other how important they are? Even in its heyday, the dinner seemed like the result of a brainstorming session between C-SPAN and Marie Antoinette.

Yet until now, when asked what I think of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I argued in favor of the tradition. And I got asked more than most. For four years, from 2012 through 2015, I held the pen on President Barack Obama’s annual monologue. (Unlike most speeches, the WHCD ones were collaborative -- the best way to explain my role is that writing jokes for the president was a team effort, but if things had gone poorly, it would have been my fault.)

As a speechwriter, what I cared most about was that the president’s jokes were good. But I always felt Americans should be happy we have the Correspondents’ Dinner for two reasons that had nothing to do with punchline quality:

First, it sends a message when the commander in chief is willing to get in front of a microphone and tell a few jokes at his own expense. In Kim Jong Il’s North Korea or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, state rituals made the leader seem like a god. The United States’ rituals should make our leader seem like a regular person.

Second, to have a professional comedian headline the dinner—a gig that often involves lightly roasting a president to his face—is a public demonstration that the spirit of the First Amendment is alive and well. George W. Bush did not enjoy being fileted by Stephen Colbert in 2006. But, this being America, Colbert’s critics merely criticized him. Had Colbert told jokes about the president in Russia or China, they might have executed him.

In other words, the two things that make an otherwise icky event worthwhile—the qualities that make it, to use the Correspondents’ Association oft-repeated phrase, “a celebration of the First Amendment”—are that the president is willing to tell jokes, including about himself; and that a comedian is invited to tell jokes, including about the president.

This year, neither of those redeeming qualities will be present.

It’s not surprising that Trump is skipping the dinner. He skipped it every year of his first term, too. What is shocking is that, for the first time in history, the Correspondents' Association has disinvited a comedian from delivering a comedic monologue because the White House complained.

With free speech under assault like never before, the First Amendment didn’t need to be celebrated, it needed to be defended. On that front, the Correspondents’ Association failed. And though I hope I’m wrong, it seems that on Saturday, it will throw a party to celebrate its failure.

A Weak Hand, Played Poorly

First off, I should say that there’s been a ton of outstanding political journalism, from both legacy and independent media, conducted over the past few months. SignalGate. The wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego García. The behind-the-scenes story of Trump’s flailing tariff plan. Fact-checking DOGE’s “wall of receipts.” Figuring out which federal workers Trump tried to fire and what the impacts might be. And much more.

There is a common misconception, however, that “White House Correspondents’ Association members” and “D.C. journalists” are the same group. They’re not. The heart of the association is the White House Press Corps - the people in the briefing room and the press pool who cover the president from the White House campus. Other political journalists can join the WHCA (the bylaws are a little complicated), but they can’t serve on the association’s board or vote in its elections.

In other words, the White House Correspondents’ Association exists to advocate for reporters who rely on access to the president and his team. And those reporters are in a genuinely difficult situation right now.

No one ever comes out and says it, but the vaunted “adversarial relationship” between the White House and its press corps is also a marriage of convenience. Reporters need information; administrations need coverage.

Even back in 2011, when I started working at the White House, that bargain was beginning to fray. The internet made it easier for presidents to bypass the traditional press in favor of what was then called “new media”—or to speak directly to the American people and ignore the press entirely.

Fast forward to 2025. The president owns one social media network. The co-president owns another. And where Presidents Obama and Biden, for all their regular frustration with reporters, believed in a free press, Trump does not. From the very beginning of his second term, he began testing the WHCA’s already weakened position – first, by bringing conservative podcasters and YouTubers to compete with the legitimate journalists in the briefing room, and then by barring the Associated Press from the White House press pool for refusing to switch from “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.”

The WHCA complained, in strong and principled terms, about the president undermining its members. But either because they didn’t want a full-on fight with Trump or didn’t think they could win one, that’s as far as the association went. Which meant that the White House Press Corps would have even less leverage when the next Trump demand arrived.

Which brings us to this year’s dinner.

On Feb. 4, the WHCA announced that the 2025 headliner would be Amber Ruffin. Frankly, I found the choice surprising. I think Ruffin is great, and very funny—but I highly doubt Trump would agree. A longtime writer for Seth Meyers, she’s unapologetically progressive. Picking Ruffin was, to me, a sign that reporters were ready for a pull-no-punches performance.

Ruffin seemed similarly ready. She was asked about the dinner on the Daily Beast podcast with Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee, and made clear that she had no interest in false equivalency—or in sticking to the singe-don’t-burn tone that usually characterizes D.C. comedy.

After calling Trump officials “kind of a bunch of murderers,” she went on to say, "They want that false equivalency that the media does. They want that. It feels great. It makes them feel like human beings. But they shouldn't get to feel that way because they're not."

I’ll admit that I winced when I read that quote. Though it’s not nearly as disgusting as the language the president reserves for immigrants or his political opponents, and I share a frustration with false equivalence, I think using that dehumanizing language is a mistake. I’m sure there were a lot of people in the White House Press Corps wondering if they really wanted Ruffin to perform after that.

But before the WHCA could make its own decision, the White House jumped in with demands. In typical Trump fashion, the administration went after not just the dinner, but the donors who make it possible. “What kind of company,” tweeted Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, “would sponsor such as [sic] hate-filled and violence-inspiring event?”

A few hours later, the Correspondents’ Association announced that its board had unanimously decided to disinvite Ruffin and replace her with no one. For the first time since 1983, there would be no headliner at the dinner.

The First Amendment is alive. But not well.

For all the “well, actually” types—yes, I know that having Amber Ruffin roast the president is not covered by the First Amendment. And after her podcast interview, plenty of reporters were probably eager to rescind her invite. But the moment White House officials got involved, both they and the press corps understood the question at stake had changed. This was no longer about an ill-advised comment on a podcast. It was about whether the White House can pressure reporters into self-censoring.

This is not just a matter of which jokes get told at a dinner. Tuesday, the executive producer of 60 Minutes stepped down because he felt he no longer had journalistic independence. By threatening to block a merger of CBS’s parent company, Trump officials have apparently been able to shape, or at least affect, the coverage they receive.

Meanwhile, the erosion of the White House Press Corps continues. Rather than comply with a court order to restore access to the Associated Press, Trump has banished all the wire services from the press pool. And Tuesday, Trump’s press secretary gave the first question—historically granted to a respected outlet or journalist—to Tim Pool, a right-wing podcaster who until recently was (apparently without his knowledge) funded in large part by Russia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has detained several immigrant students solely for writing op-eds the White House didn’t like.

With free speech under assault, and the press corps likely regretting its choice of headliner, what should the WHCA have done about its annual comedy night? I think the answer is simple, although it would have required some guts. It could have said, “We don’t like what Amber Ruffin said on this podcast. We hope she’ll read the room and stick with our traditional singe-don’t-burn tone. But freedom of speech includes speech we don’t care for, or speech that insults people in power, and the adversarial relationship between press and president means that we don’t take direction from the White House, period. So, our invitation stands.”

That didn’t happen, obviously.

To “celebrate free speech” in 2025 would be like celebrating the state of American-European relations, or the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win. But it’s not too late to make the Correspondents’ Dinner at least a partial defense of the First Amendment. Trump officials - including members of their press team—will be in attendance Saturday night. It’s important for press corps members to say—on camera and with government officials present--what they’ve said in strongly worded statements about the White House’s attacks on the First Amendment.

Just as Harvard argued—compellingly—that attacks on universities hurt America, reporters need to be clear about how much all Americans have to lose if Trump’s attempts to undermine the free press succeed.

I worry that we’ll get the opposite: a night of mutual back-patting, pretending this is a normal administration, and after-partying on the deck of the Titanic. If the press corps buries its head in the sand, it will hasten its own irrelevance.

But more than that, it will hurt our country. At the end of every Correspondents’ Dinner speech, presidents of both parties—until Trump—ended with a “serious close,” a short paean to the importance of the press in a free society. These conclusions were not nearly as fun to work on as the jokes. We often, I’ll be honest, saved them for the last minute. But the sentiments they conveyed were sincere. Here’s just one example:

“We really are lucky,” said Obama in 2014, after a year of particularly brutal coverage, “to live in a country where reporters get to give a head of state a hard time on a daily basis.”

Let’s hope the White House Correspondents’ Association agrees.

David Litt wrote speeches for President Barack Obama from 2011 to 2016. A New York Times bestselling author, his newest book, “It’s Only Drowning,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in June. He also posts under @davidlitt on Instagram and BlueSky, writes the newsletter “Word Salad,” and was born with an innate talent for cooking shrimp.

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