![\"Trump](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/lcimg-75ea6d3a-69e3-4341-a0fc-0884be8b0d2b.jpeg\")
(Reuters)<\/p>\nThis was Donald Trump’s first appearance at the dinner as president.<\/p>\n
He attended twice as a private citizen in 2011 and 2015 but since taking office, the president had shunned convention and boycotted the charity event.<\/p>\n
In a post on Truth Social last month, he said he did so because “the Press was extraordinarily bad to me, FAKE NEWS ALL, right from the beginning of my First Term, I boycotted the event, and never went as Honoree\u2026 However, I look forward to being with everyone this year. Hopefully, it will be something very Special.”<\/p>\n
The dinner traditionally offers an opportunity for presidents to interact with members of the press and several \u2014 including George W Bush, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama \u2014 have used their addresses to highlight the importance of the media’s role in democracy.<\/p>\n
However, throughout both his terms in office, Donald Trump has attacked, sued and threatened journalists and news outlets he believes have been unfair to him.<\/p>\n
(Reuters)<\/p>\n
In this term alone, the president has defunded public media, launched lawsuits against multiple news outlets and made personal attacks against some reporters, including calling female journalists “maggot” and “piggy”.<\/p>\n
A number of journalists and media organisations wrote to the White House Correspondents’ Association demanding a condemnation of some of the president’s actions during the dinner, writing “this cannot be business as usual with the press standing up to applaud the man who attacks them on a daily basis”.<\/p>\n
But the association responded by saying it was happy the president had accepted the invitation and “we look forward to hosting him”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This was Donald Trump’s first appearance at the dinner as president. He attended twice as a private citizen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[305767,2490,43,44,305770,41,39,42,40,305769,305768],"class_list":["post-631123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-correspondents-dinner","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-security-incident","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trump-evacuated","tag-us-correspondents-dinner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}