Bidens to attend White House Correspondents’ Dinner after Trump absence
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will attend next week’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the first since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the press association announced Wednesday.
“The @WHCA is pleased to host President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden as we honor the First Amendment at our dinner on April 30,” the White House Correspondents’ Association tweeted.
The White House also confirmed the president and first lady’s plans to The Post.
The April 30 soiree will be headlined by Trevor Noah, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” and will host up to 2,600 guests at the Washington Hilton hotel.
News organizations shelled out $350 per seat at the highly anticipated dinner, which has not been held since 2019.
Most of the guests are expected to be unmasked as pandemic-induced restrictions recede around much of the country. Guests are required to test negative for COVID-19, though a self-reported result from a rapid test has been deemed sufficient.
Biden will be the first sitting president to show up to the dinner since 2016. Former President Donald Trump made a point of blowing off the occasion prior to the pandemic due to his contentious relationship with the White House press corps, instead throwing his signature campaign-style rallies as a form of alternative programming.
“A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation’s capital right now,” Trump said in 2017.
“And 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 and with a much, much larger crowd and much better people, right?”
A year later, the president derided the dinner as “so bad and so fake,” sending press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in his stead.
In 2019, Trump blasted the event again, calling it “so boring and so negative.”
“I like positive things,” he told reporters on the lawn, touting a Wisconsin rally held on the same day as the dinner.
While the 2020 dinner was ultimately canceled, Trump indicated in May of that year he was “inclined” to skip the event.
“I could change. I could change. If they treated this administration fairly, I’d change my mind,” he told The Post at the time. “But they just can’t do it. You see the hostility.”
Prior to Trump, no president had missed the correspondents’ dinner since Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he was recovering from an assassination attempt.
This year’s dinner comes four weeks after the 630-guest Gridiron Club dinner left more than 70 people with confirmed coronavirus cases, including cabinet secretaries, several members of Congress, multiple White House officials and a large number of journalists.
Attendees at the April 2 dinner were not required to test before attending and the majority of guests did not wear face coverings.
