The White House Correspondents Association F***ed Up

The WHCA chose Amber Ruffin, the perfect host for this year's dinner...and then they chose to kowtow to MAGA instead

This past Saturday, at a pivotal moment in history for the first amendment, the White House Correspondents Association came together to tell President Trump loudly and clearly: “Thank you, Sir. May I have another?”

The White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) is the organization that represents the hundreds of journalists tasked with holding the President’s feet to the fire, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. This past weekend was their opportunity to do just that.

Here’s what happened instead:

Leading up to the annual dinner, which is playfully referred to as “nerd prom” (a term, which feels redundant if your prom experience was anything like mine), the WHCA made the excellent decision to tap Amber Ruffin as host. Ruffin is a Black woman known for her work on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and her own The Amber Ruffin Show on Peacock.

Now, some might assume that the Trump administration was always going to have an issue with a Black woman hosting. I, however, thought that maybe MAGA would view the words “Black” and “woman” as a double negative which would, logically speaking, become a positive in their minds. But I forgot that Amber Ruffin is also queer…a third negative in MAGA math that brings us back to a net negative.

While obviously nobody was surprised that numerous members of the Trump administration wasted no time complaining about Ruffin’s selection as host (what a bunch of beta snowflakes, right?), I never could have imagined that the WHCA would actually listen to them. They gave Ruffin an ultimatum: make fun of both sides equally or step aside.

In the WHCA’s defense, I’m sure that before Shohei Ohtani takes the mound before any game, the Dodgers GM also pulls him aside to insist that he throw an equal number of pitches with both his right AND left hands.

When Ruffin refused to portray the Nazis and non-Nazis in the same light, she was uninvited.

There are numerous reasons that the WHCA couldn’t have picked a worse time for such a staggering display of small dick energy. But on top of everything you would think of stands the fact that Donald Trump is the only president in the dinner’s one hundred-plus-year history to never once attend.

Which begs the question: why the FUCK should his opinion matter if he isn’t even going to be there?

It’s like asking someone their dietary restrictions after they already RSVPed “no” to your dinner party.

It’s like the Academy Awards having Rob Schneider weigh in on this year’s Oscars ceremony.

It’s like the NFL soliciting the Cleveland Browns’ opinion on where this year's Super Bowl should take place.

I could go on but you get the picture.

OK, fine, one more: It’s like asking for Kim Reynolds’ opinion on who the next Governor of Iowa should be.

If you can’t tell, this is all very personal to me.

It’s probably no surprise that journalism was a frequent topic of conversation around my family’s dinner table growing up. Yes, I have finally fully embraced my identity as a journalism nepo-baby, not unlike Bronny James or Colin Hanks or Hunter Biden (minus the, uh, crack and prostitutes).

But beyond the familial reasons, I have long considered White House Correspondents Dinner the perfect encapsulation of my passions: The fusion of politics and comedy.

At age 10, I saw a comedic video that Bill Clinton had made for the WHCA dinner about being a lame duck. He was riding a bike around the White House, mowing his lawn, and stealing from the vending machine. After watching Clinton get mercilessly mocked by every reporter, comedian, and talk show host for my entire life until that point, it was jarring to see him in on the joke.

As I got older, it became my dream to someday write comedy for the dinner.

In 2023, it finally happened. A friend of mine who served on one of President Biden’s committees put me in touch with that year’s speechwriters. I got to not only submit jokes, but help the President’s team pick from the hundreds of submissions they’d received from other comedy writers from various late night shows. Some of my own material even made it into President Biden’s remarks.

This year, after the hosting debacle, I chose not to watch the dinner for one of the only times in my adult life. Although I did see one single clip of it online in which, while accepting an award, Axios reporter Alex Thompson addressed what he clearly saw as the greatest issue facing journalism right now: The “cover up” of Joe Biden’s mental decline. I wish I was joking.

To be perfectly clear: This is not a shot at the press, who the very man that the WHCA just kowtowed to calls “The enemy of the people.” But this is a reminder that individual journalists cannot and should not rely solely on institutions for direction.

In a world of WHCA leaders, be a Scott Pelley, who risked his own job to call out corporate censorship by his employers at Paramount on Sunday night’s edition of 60 Minutes.

Even better, subscribe to each and every member of the Iowa Writers collaborative.

My hope is that the Amber Ruffin incident was just a rare lapse of judgement by the WHCA and that by next year’s dinner, they’ll make things up to those they let down. If there’s still a free press by then.

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