Boycotting the White House Correspondents' Dinner: Trump Broke a 36-Year Presidential Tradition and Ordered Administration Officials to Stay Away
Tier 5Documented2017-02-25 to 2019-04-27
Factual Summary
During his first term, President Donald Trump refused to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2017, 2018, and 2019, becoming the first president to skip the event since Ronald Reagan missed it in 1981 after being shot in an assassination attempt. Unlike Reagan's absence, which was the result of a near-fatal injury, Trump's boycott was deliberate, sustained, and accompanied by efforts to undermine the event and the press corps it represents.
The White House Correspondents' Dinner has been held annually since 1921 and has served since the 1980s as an occasion where presidents of both parties appear before the press, deliver self-deprecating humor, and affirm, at least symbolically, the role of a free press in American democracy. Every president from Reagan onward attended the dinner, including George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, even in years when their relationships with the press were adversarial.
On February 25, 2017, Trump announced he would not attend the dinner that year. Instead, he held a campaign-style rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the evening of the dinner, April 29, 2017. At the rally, Trump attacked the media, calling journalists "fake news" and telling his supporters: "I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington's swamp, spending my evening with all of you."
In 2018, Trump again skipped the dinner and held a counter-rally in Washington Township, Michigan, where he referred to the correspondents' dinner as "phony." In 2019, Trump ordered a broader boycott. White House Cabinet Secretary Bill McGinley assembled the agencies' chiefs of staff and issued a directive that members of the administration not attend the dinner. Trump called the event "so boring, and so negative" and held a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that evening.
The pattern extended beyond mere non-attendance. Trump used the occasions to stage competing events that framed the press as the enemy and the dinner as an elitist ritual disconnected from ordinary Americans. This was consistent with his broader rhetorical strategy of delegitimizing the press, which included labeling mainstream outlets as "the enemy of the people," restricting press briefings, revoking reporters' credentials, and characterizing unfavorable coverage as fabricated.
Primary Sources
1. Trump tweet announcing he would not attend the 2017 White House Correspondents' Dinner, February 25, 2017
2. Trump rally speech, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, April 29, 2017 (C-SPAN)
3. White House statement on administration boycott of the 2019 dinner, April 5, 2019
4. VOA News: "Trump Orders Administration Officials Not to Attend White House Correspondents Dinner," April 2019
Corroborating Sources
1. NPR: "Trump Will Be First President In 36 Years To Skip White House Correspondents' Dinner," February 25, 2017
2. ABC News: "President Trump snubs White House Correspondents' dinner for consecutive year," April 28, 2018
3. Washington Post: "Thanks to Trump, the White House Correspondents Association dinner has become deservedly dull," April 23, 2019
4. CNN: "White House Correspondents Dinner organizers capitulate to Trump," November 2018
Counterarguments and Context
Trump supporters argued that the correspondents' dinner had become a self-congratulatory celebrity event that had little to do with press freedom and that Trump was under no obligation to attend. Some commentators, including those sympathetic to the press, acknowledged that the dinner had become excessively focused on entertainment and Hollywood glamour rather than journalism. Trump's decision not to attend was within his prerogative as president, and no law or constitutional provision requires the president to participate. However, the tradition of presidential attendance served a democratic function beyond entertainment: it represented the president's willingness to appear before the press, accept scrutiny, and participate in the lighthearted mutual accountability that the event symbolized. Trump's replacement of the dinner with counter-rallies attacking the press, combined with his directive that administration officials boycott the event, transformed a personal decision into an institutional assault on the press-president relationship. The boycott was not an isolated act but part of a sustained campaign to position the media as an adversary of the people.
Author's Note
This entry is classified as Tier 5 because the decision not to attend the correspondents' dinner is a normative judgment rather than a legal or factual violation. No president is required to attend. The significance lies in what the boycott represented within the broader pattern of press delegitimization: the counter-rallies, the administration-wide directive to boycott, and the rhetorical framing of the press as the enemy. Whether this constitutes a violation of democratic norms depends on the weight one assigns to the informal traditions that sustain the press-government relationship. The entry documents the factual record and leaves the normative assessment to the reader.