There is something faintly absurd about a Washington press corps that spends the year insisting on its adversarial role, only to gather — on cue, in evening dress — to celebrate proximity to the very power it is meant to scrutinize: the President of the United States.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has long traded on this contradiction. This year, however, the juxtaposition is so stark that it begins to look less like ritual and more like an act of self-sabotage. Tonight, Donald Trump will be the guest of honor.
More than 200 journalists, including Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, have urged the White House Correspondents’ Association to confront him directly over what they describe as sustained attacks on the free press. The appeal, while earnest, is fundamentally beside the point. The problem is not what is said at the dinner, but what the dinner itself represents: a ritual that blurs the line between scrutiny and accommodation to power.
The dinner will proceed as it always does — televised in prime time, surrounded by a circuit of receptions where access is traded, proximity performed, and the fiction of intimacy carefully maintained.
I won’t attend. I didn’t when I began ten years ago, and I am not starting now. If anything, the case for staying away has only become clearer.
I don’t see what CBS is doing honoring a president with a track record of insulting journalists and stripping press credentials. In Washington, Donald Trump has managed to bend the press faster than one can invoke the First Amendment.
That contradiction was on display again this week, when David Ellison hosted a private dinner honoring Trump at the newly retitled “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.” Trump spoke for roughly an hour at an event framed as both a tribute to the president and a celebration of the First Amendment.
The timing is not incidental. Ellison’s company is seeking Justice Department approval for a proposed $111 billion merger involving Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.
The alignment is difficult to ignore. When access, regulation and corporate interest converge so neatly, the language of principle — of press freedom, of independence — begins to sound less like conviction and more like performance.Even within Washington, the optics are drawing scrutiny. Sen. Chris Murphy warned that figures like Ellison — and what he called “information oligarchs” — should “enjoy it while they can,” arguing that a future Democratic majority would seek to break up media conglomerates he views as anti-consumer and hostile to free speech.
My relationship with power has always been clear: yes, I have access. I can be an insider. But I am not a member. The fact that I can walk out at any moment is what makes me independent. This is not a slogan I came up with today — I have been consistent.My posture toward the presidency I have covered since 2016 has not changed. I won’t be at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I could be. I could buy a table — two, even — and invite powerful people I happen to know. But to impress whom? Myself?
The First Amendment in America in 2026 feels increasingly hollow. There is no real opposition, and much of the media follows a single line, with only occasional attempts — like those from The Atlantic — that rarely carry enough weight to make a difference.
The ability to leave, to opt out without consequence to my work, is what makes that access meaningful. Independence, in this sense, is not rhetorical. It is structural.The White House press room has never been a place for comfort, nor should it be.
I recall the off-the-record happy hours on Washington rooftops — carefully staged informality, access softened by wine and whiskey. I avoided them then, as I avoid them now. I am not adept at small talk, nor inclined toward it. Nor do I pretend that those in power mistake us for friends. We are, at best, conduits through which a message is laundered into legitimacy.
Politeness, certainly. Professionalism, always. But let us not indulge the fiction that communications teams exist to enlighten the public. They exist to protect the president’s interest, full stop.
The other day, Hakeem Jeffries told me Trump is the “dumbest president ever” and challenged him to a debate. The response came directly from Trump, via his rapid-response social media operation — on terms that suited the presidency. It always does. Even the appearance of advantage is managed.
This is how the system works.
And the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a perfect expression of it: the performance of access, the illusion of being an insider, when in reality that access is tightly controlled and carefully managed.
The wine, everyone will tell you, is not that good. The champagne is not premium. And there are too many people trying to look important — many of whom couldn’t find Iran on a map.In that context, the dinner takes on a different meaning. It is less a celebration of journalism than a performance of proximity — an evening that suggests a level of intimacy with power that does not, in practice, exist.
The details are almost beside the point, though they are telling. The atmosphere leans toward spectacle. The signaling of importance outweighs the substance. And the work itself — the daily, often unglamorous reporting on the presidency — is largely absent from what is being celebrated.
This is not where journalism proves its value. It is where it risks losing it.
So I do not attend. Not out of detachment, but out of alignment with the role I believe the press is meant to play. Independence, if it is to mean anything, requires refusal as much as access.
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