What Is The White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

2 min readApr 26, 2026 01:59 PM IST

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner — or WHCD — became the unlikely backdrop for a shooting that put the world on edge on Saturday night.

Organised by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), the dinner brings together the journalists who cover the US presidency, senior government officials, members of Congress, and a rotating cast of celebrities and business leaders, under one roof at the Washington Hilton hotel.

The WHCA was founded on February 25, 1914, by journalists seeking to protect their access to the president, after an unfounded rumour spread that a US congressional committee would decide which reporters could attend President Woodrow Wilson’s press conferences.

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Trump and the dinner

United States President Donald Trump attended the 2011 dinner as a private guest and was publicly mocked by President Barack Obama and comedian Seth Meyers — an evening Fox News described as a defining moment in Trump’s political story. Once in office, he skipped it entirely across his first term and the first year of his second, telling Fox News the press had treated him “rudely and crudely”.

Saturday was his first appearance as a sitting president. On the eve of the dinner, nearly 500 retired journalists signed a petition opposing Trump’s attendance, CBS News reported. They argued that it risked normalising his administration’s attacks on press freedom.

Shirtly into the evening, shots were fired near a Secret Service screening checkpoint, according to the AP. Trump was evacuated from the ballroom. The suspect, reportedly identified as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of California, was taken into custody.

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