President Donald Trump went to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Friday, July 24, 2026. He spoke for just over an hour at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, a hotel that used to be called the Trump International Hotel. The dinner was supposed to happen on April 25, but it was postponed after a man with a weapon caused Secret Service agents to rush Trump and first lady Melania Trump out of the Washington Hilton ballroom. Trump later called the incident "the attempted mass murder" (Reuters).

Trump said on Truth Social on June 2 that he would attend the rescheduled dinner (Reuters). The WHCA says the dinner celebrates the First Amendment, the part of the Constitution that protects free speech and a free press. The dinner also includes journalism awards and scholarships. The association said the rescheduled event would have extra safety measures. It has about 900 members across more than 250 news outlets and chose mentalist Oz Pearlman to entertain.

Trump started by talking about the three-month delay. "As I said three months ago, the show must go on," he said, praising the decision to reschedule (NPR). He said he had taken out the sharpest jokes from the speech he had written for the original April dinner.

The president made fun of many public figures, including Jane Fonda, Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and former Gov. Chris Christie. He joked about serving a third term as president, saying "the third time will be better yet" before adding, "I'm only kidding." Near the end, he put on a red "Trump 2028" cap and joked about running again. NPR reported that some of his comments "flirted with racism."

The audience's reaction changed over the course of the speech. Trump walked in to polite applause and sat through more than an hour of journalism awards before speaking. People laughed warmly early on, but the laughs thinned out as the insults piled up. At times, Trump criticized his own speechwriters' jokes while reading them.

The venue itself got attention. "It's great to be back at a place that I know very well, because I built it," Trump said about the Waldorf Astoria ballroom. He also talked about a ballroom he is building at the White House. The previous year's dinner was held at the Washington Hilton on April 26, 2025.

Outgoing WHCA president Weijia Jiang of CBS News thanked Trump for his support during the program. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attended with Trump and Jiang. Trump mentioned the Iran war briefly and said he would come back to the dinner next year.

Most of the journalism awards given out at the dinner were for stories that challenged Trump and his administration. Some reporters in the audience had been denounced by Trump and barred from events before. Tyler Pager of the New York Times won a journalism award at the dinner. He was also one of the reporters who had been subpoenaed by Trump's Justice Department.

The broader context here is the tension between what the dinner stands for and how the administration has treated the press. The WHCA dinner is about the First Amendment and recognizing reporting that holds people in power accountable. This year's award winners were honored mostly for work that directly challenged the sitting president, and some had been targeted by his own Justice Department. The president sat through those awards, told jokes, and praised a building he used to own. That captures the dinner's usual awkwardness in an especially sharp way. Trump has a pattern of engaging with institutions he has also attacked, and his promise to return next year signals that the WHCA dinner, despite the disruptions and the tense atmosphere, stays on the Washington calendar.