For the second consecutive year, President Trump plans to counter-program the annual White House correspondents’ dinner.
The president’s re-election campaign announced Tuesday that he will host a rally in Michigan at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 28, while the gathering of elite journalists, celebrities, and political professionals is underway back in Washington. Trump held a similar event in Pennsylvania on the night of the correspondents’ dinner last year.
“While media celebrate themselves with DC swamp, president celebrates American economic revival,” read the banner on the campaign’s announcement.
Campaign spokesman Michael Glassner touted the rally’s location — Washington, Mich., which sits in a county Trump carried by 50,000 votes in 2016 — as “a completely different Washington” from where the black tie event will be held.
“The president is really looking forward to highlighting the growing success of his economic policies for Michiganders, including historic deregulation and tax cuts that are delivering a pay raise to working families; resulting in record-low unemployment, remarkable reductions in food stamp enrollment, and a return of the American dream for millions of families,” Glassner said.
Though Trump himself has declined to attend, several top administration officials are expected to join various media outlets as guests for the decades-old soiree.
The president’s decision to skip the dinner surprised few who have paid close attention to his increasingly tense relationship with the media. His spokeswoman Sarah Sanders informed the White House Correspondents Association earlier this month that Trump did not plan to attend but “actively encourage[d] members of the executive branch to attend and join us as we celebrate the First Amendment.”
Trump bashed the media during his Pennsylvania rally last year, claiming journalists and Hollywood actors were “consoling each other in a Washington ballroom” while he and his supporters were celebrating his administration’s accomplishments in the Keystone state.
“I could not be more thrilled to be more than 100 miles away… with a much larger crowd and much, much better people,” he had said at the time.
Some longtime friends and advisers to the president have previously claimed it was the 2011 correspondents dinner, during which Trump sat in the crowd humiliated as then-President Obama and comedian Seth Meyers mocked his birtherism claims, that prompted him to challenge the Washington establishment by launching a presidential bid in 2016.
The annual correspondents dinner will take place on April 28 at the Washington Hilton.
