WASHINGTON, D.C. – Three months after gunfire shattered one of Washington’s most storied traditions, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is coming back.
The rescheduled dinner will take place on Friday, July 24, at the Waldorf Astoria on Pennsylvania Avenue – a venue with its own complicated Washington history as the former Trump International Hotel – with President Trump expected to attend. White House Correspondents’ Association president and CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang announced in a letter to members, framing the decision as much a statement of principle as a scheduling matter.
“This dinner will not only be an opportunity to carry out our program,” Jiang wrote. “It will be a statement that violence has no place in American life and a free press will not be intimidated into silence. As you have all demonstrated, courage and community can and should rise above.”
The original dinner, held April 25 at the Washington Hilton, drew more than 2,500 guests. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among those in attendance. It was the first WHCA dinner Trump had attended as president; he skipped both terms of his first presidency and the 2025 event.
Just before 9 p.m., as mentalist Oz Pearlman performed a trick on stage beside Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, chaos broke out. Suspect Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old from Torrance, California, who had been staying as a guest at the hotel, rushed the security checkpoint outside the ballroom armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a .38 semiautomatic pistol, and multiple knives. One Secret Service officer was struck in his bullet-resistant vest and hospitalized; he later recovered. Allen was arrested outside the ballroom.
Jiang was on stage beside the president when it happened. “It all happened so fast,” she recalled on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “When I heard something in the audience, I thought it was a protester – something we’re very used to. But then, when I saw SWAT team members come to the head table and say, ‘Down, down, down,’ we were crawling off the stage.”
After the Secret Service swept the principals to safety, Jiang returned to the podium to address the still-assembled crowd, directing guests to leave under law enforcement protocol. Trump, she said, refused to simply disappear into the night. “He really wanted to talk it through,” she said of a private conversation with the president backstage. “He told me that we were not going to be deterred. He refused to stand down, and that’s why he stayed.” Trump went on to deliver a late-night briefing from the White House press briefing room, where he called on Jiang for the first question.
At that briefing, Trump reflected on the strange bond the evening had forged. “This was an event dedicated to freedom of speech that was supposed to bring together members of both parties with members of the press,” he said, “and in a certain way, it did, because of the fact that they just unified.”
Allen was charged with attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, use of a firearm during a crime of violence, transporting a firearm across state lines, and assaulting a federal officer. He pleaded not guilty on May 11. A manifesto attributed to him described his grievances against the Trump administration; he reportedly referred to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”
Jiang was unambiguous that rescheduling was a deliberate act, not a foregone conclusion. “Rescheduling was not automatic,” she wrote to WHCA members. “It was a choice that the WHCA board made after thoughtful consideration and input from our members. I want to thank board members for the time and care they brought to this decision, particularly on the security front.”
The July 24th event will look different from the traditional dinner. It will be more intimate in scale, with significantly enhanced security measures and new access procedures that Jiang said will be communicated directly to attendees. The WHCA has also fundraised to ensure members who paid for the April event will not have to pay again, and the organization is providing travel support to scholarship and journalism award winners so they can be recognized at the makeup dinner.
Trump announced his own attendance on Truth Social, calling the rescheduling “a sign of Strength and Fortitude” and accepting Jiang’s personal invitation to speak. He also revealed the venue — at the Waldorf Astoria, formerly the Trump International Hotel in the landmark Old Post Office building — before the WHCA had made a public announcement. “I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people,” Trump wrote, “but we will soon find out. In any event, it will be a ‘HOT’ ticket!”
The evening has placed Jiang, who has covered the White House for CBS since 2018, at the center of one of the more remarkable stories of a remarkable year. She had spent eight months planning the April dinner, and by her own account, hoped it might restore a measure of normalcy between the press and an administration with which many journalists have had an openly adversarial relationship. When she wrote to members about the rescheduled dinner, Jiang tied the decision explicitly to the broader stakes of the moment. “We will not allow an act of violence to have the last word,” she wrote, “especially during a year when we are reflecting on the 250th anniversary of America and everything we stand for.”
The dinner is set for Friday, July 24.
You must be logged in to post a comment.