U.S. President Donald Trump and CBS News senior White House correspondent and WHCA President Weijia Jiang salute during the 2026 White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, DC, on July 24, 2026. Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images President Trump appeared at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, which took place in Washington, D.C. on Friday with a new location and a drastically reduced list of attendees, following the cancellation of the event in April after a gunman fired shots as the event was underway.
Moved to the Waldorf, Astoria, in the nation’s capital instead of the Washington Hilton and reduced from 2,600 guests down to around 680, it was less a star-studded event that each year sees celebrity guests brush elbows with reporters and editors as they sit with the politicians they cover — the optics of which are criticized each year by journalists and critics alike.
Related Stories
General News Donald Trump Booed at World Cup Final
General News Donald Trump Drops Part of His $10 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Against the BBC
For the make-up dinner, the WHCA is also bringing back the Secret Service member who survived the April shooting, when 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, who allegedly intended to target multiple Trump administration officials, was arrested near the screening area outside the banquet hall after running past the security checkpoint. Plus honoring the Washington Hilton staff who stayed on the scene and continued tending to rattled guests.
Elements of the first dinner remained. The awards were handed out; mentalist Oz Pearlman, who got just one private trick for the White House press secretary at the first dinner before gunshots caused chaos, returned to deliver some levity; and ahead of the event, a group of hundreds of former journalists and press freedom groups sent a letter to the WHCA. Now, they were urging the association to capitalize on Trump’s attendance by calling him out for his administration’s attacks on First Amendment rights, which include recently subpoenaing New York Times reporters over their coverage and threatening to revoke licenses of broadcasters.
The president took to the stage around 9:30 p.m. ET and brought up the attempted attack early in his much-anticipated speech, which has been speculated upon heavily in April and again ahead of the July event. Traditionally, the dinner’s speeches are a roast of the attendees and the president himself.
“The attempted mass murder at the Washington Hilton — that’s what it could have been — was an assault on our democracy itself,” Trump said. “A very serious situation. Many of you were there with me, and some showed extreme bravery, like Pete Hegseth, Steve Miller, Tom Holman. Really, they were standing on tables. And most of you were under the table,” he said to Friday night’s attendees, which got some laughs.
Trump’s first joke to fall completely flat came soon and involved a rapper and MAGA convert who he recently had at a White House event.
“After hearing the gunshots, many people yelled, ‘Get down! Get down!’ which caused Nicki Minaj to start twerking,” he said, referring to the dance. “Do you believe it? Get down. She’s the only one that really understood what that meant.”
Trump’s speech began to meander as he at first reminisced about the Waldorf Astoria in the 1980s and moved to several topics and name-dropped celebrities not in the room and with whom he has personal gripes, some going back for decades. Rosie O’Donnell, Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen all got a mention, with the latter’s looks as he ages compared to the president’s own. Trump joked that his live show, where he was railing about the administration’s policies, was now called “Bored in the U.S.A.”
More to come…
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
