![\"President](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/trump-and-leavitt-P7ZGYJOQM5HQBESTQY3MXWUB7E.jpg\")
<\/p>\nUS President Donald Trump returned to the stage of the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivering a rambling speech that praised some journalists, took potshots at others, made jokes about public figures’ weight and intellect, and quipped about a third presidential term.<\/p>\n
He assured the crowd of journalists, though, that he’d scrapped the most biting parts of his remarks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was going to be a doozy,\u201d Trump said about the speech he\u2019d been prepared to give in April, before a gunman upended the original dinner and forced its postponement.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I said three months ago, the show must go on,\u201d the president said to begin his remarks, hailing the decision to reschedule the dinner. He referred to \u201cthe attempted mass murder\u201d that could have happened that night in April, but then moved largely to humor \u2014 and insults.<\/p>\n
Trump’s return to the correspondents’ dinner \u2014 and his promise to come back next year as well \u2014 represented a notable moment in his relationship with the news media, which he has attacked, sued and taken administrative action against since he took office for his second term early last year. Among the audience members were reporters he had sanctioned and barred from events.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s sometimes off-colour speech, which lasted more than an hour, was full of vague potshots directed at individuals he doesn\u2019t like \u2014 from actress Jane Fonda to rock legend Bruce Springsteen to \u201cBarack Hussein Obama.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among other targets of Trump\u2019s pointed humour: Late-night talk show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel; Representative Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; California Governor Gavin Newsom; former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie; and Trump’s own speechwriters, whose jokes he sometimes criticised even as he delivered them. Some of the comments flirted with racism.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
President Trump alongside White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The president also spent some time expressing pride in the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, formerly the Trump International Hotel. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be back at a place that I know very well because I built it,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Trump also made reference to the journalism awards that had been handed out earlier in the evening, most of them for stories challenging him and his administration. \u201cDo I have a say in those awards?\u201d he asked with a grimace.<\/p>\n
He made a brief mention of the Iran war and several remarks about the ballroom he is building at the White House. He also used the occasion to joke about the possibility he would serve a third term \u2014 something barred by the US Constitution’s 22nd Amendment.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like my presidency, the second time is always better,\u201d the president quipped. \u201cAnd the third time will be better yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI\u2019m only kidding.\u201d Then, at the end, he donned a red cap that said \u201cTrump 2028\u201d and delivered the \u201cscoop\u201d that he was running again.<\/p>\n
It was a very different dinner than the previous one<\/p>\n
Earlier, Trump had entered the ballroom to polite applause, and was thanked for his support by outgoing White House Correspondents\u2019 Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS News. After dinner, he then sat through more than an hour of awards presentations.<\/p>\n
One of the winners, Tyler Pager of the New York Times, was in fact one of the reporters who had been subpoenaed by Trump\u2019s Justice Department over his reporting about Trump\u2019s Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet. Those subpoenas were withdrawn in a New York courtroom \u2014 just one of the arenas where the president, in his second term, has been seeking to control media coverage that displeases him.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/the-dinner-was-hosted-at-a-high-security-waldorf-hotel-XVA6IZ6JTVETXI5HHZF3TKRCLQ.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The dinner was hosted at a high-security Waldorf Hotel. (Source: Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The rescheduled dinner was taking place at a smaller venue this time that held only about 700 people. Security was markedly tighter. Guests entered via a single entrance, through two ID checks and past a detection dog, armed officers and security guards. There was no red carpet and no separate cocktail receptions preceding the dinner.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s try this again,\u201d Jiang quipped, welcoming the crowd. The White House press corps, she noted, \u201calways have a follow-up.\u201d Turning serious, she referred back to the trauma and confusion of the original dinner in April.<\/p>\n
\u201cTonight our message is this: We are back,\u201d she said. \u201cWe will not be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early in his speech, Trump signalled that he had decided to tone it down. But he kept some zingers. Like this one, to the media-heavy audience: \u201cThis is really the largest group of \u2018Trump Derangement Syndrome\u2019 people put together at one time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump returned to the stage of the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivering a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[65,42,43,64,40,38,41,39,66],"class_list":["post-543249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-north-america","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}