President Donald Trump will skip the White House Correspondents Association dinner in late April for the second year in a row, the White House told the organization Friday.
Statement on President and WHCA Dinner pic.twitter.com/WiemgnIvcq
— WHCA (@whca) April 6, 2018
The statement from WHCA president Margaret Talev however noted that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will attend the dinner and sit at the head table in lieu of Trump. Trump will also encourage other senior administration officials to attend the dinner as opposed to the year prior where no members of the administration were in attendance.
Trump foreshadowed his announcement in a radio interview Friday morning saying “I probably won’t do it”…”I sort of feel that the press is so bad,”….”It’s so fake, it’s so made up. I mean, ‘sources say’ and they have no sources. They’re like novelists. I call them novelists.”
Prior to Trump skipping the dinner in 2017, the last President to do so was former President Ronald Reagan while he was recovering from a gunshot wound by an attempted assassin.