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When comic Amber Ruffin was announced as the featured entertainer at this year's White House Correspondents Association dinner, the group's president said she'd be “roasting the most powerful people on all sides of the aisle and the journalists who cover them.”
But after Ruffin referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers” on a podcast last week, and made clear her focus would largely be on the president, she was out.
Over the weekend, WHCA president Eugene Daniels said his group wanted to refocus the ritzy annual event on journalistic excellence and wouldn't have a comedian. Daniels, host of an upcoming MSNBC weekend show, made no mention of Ruffin's comments in a statement and didn't return a request for comment on Monday.
The president isn't expected to attend the dinner, scheduled for April 26.
An annual event where journalists often invite entertainers as guests, the dinner has featured comics such as Stephen Colbert, Colin Jost and Trevor Noah. Memorably, in 2011, it had as a guest a stone-faced Donald Trump, former star of “The Apprentice,” listening to jokes told by President Barack Obama at his expense.
The last time a comedian did not perform at the dinner was during the first Trump administration in 2019, when historian Ron Chernow spoke.
Ruffin, a writer for NBC's Seth Meyers and featured on CNN's “Have I Got News For You,” told The Daily Beast podcast last week that she was told “you need to be equal and be sure that you give it to both sides and I was like, there's no way" that's going to happen.
Ruffin suggested the Trump team lacked a sense of humor. “I think they get their feelings hurt,” she said. “They want that false equivalency that the media does.”
It was also unclear on Monday when, or if, she made her feelings known to the correspondents' group that she wasn't going to spread her humor around. A spokeswoman for NBC did not return a message about Ruffin.
Fellow comic Samantha Bee, a co-host of the The Daily Beast podcast, agreed during the interview with Ruffin that “it can't be evenhanded.”
Taylor Budowich, a deputy chief of staff at the White House, called Ruffin a “second-rate comedian” and posted her podcast comments on X. “What kind of a sensible, responsible journalist would attend something like this?” Budowich asked on the social media site.
Daniels, in his statement on Saturday, said that he'd been planning for a couple of weeks to reimagine the dinner tradition for a couple of weeks. “I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work and providing scholarship and mentorship to the next generation of journalists.”
Budowich subsequently criticized the correspondents group for “turning a blind eye” to Ruffin's comments.
“It's an indictment on how broken and useless this organization has become, so sad that such a storied and consequential group has been so quickly driven into irrelevancy,” he wrote.
Budowich and his colleagues have lately sought to have the administration take over duties the correspondents group has handled for decades, such as which reporters participate in press pools to cover the president and even the seating chart for journalists at the White House press room.
The Associated Press is currently in court after the administration blocked the outlet from access to certain presidential events in retaliation for not following Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico in its influential AP Stylebook, which provides guidance for journalists on word usage. The AP does note that the president calls it the Gulf of America.
Ruffin's exit quickly became a hot topic online, with some critics accusing the correspondents association of “capitulating” to Trump while fans of the president aren't sorry to see her go.
“I would prefer it to be funny,” co-host Sara Haines said on ABC's “The View” on Monday, “and it sounds like this was going to be a tinderbox.”
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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social
