Journalists attending Saturday night’s annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington snubbed a toast for President Trump, breaking a 140-year-old tradition of toasting the sitting president.
Instead, the journalists raised their glasses to the First Amendment at the off-the-record, white-tie fête — a deliberate shift underscoring the increasingly strained relationship between the press and the Trump administration.
Neither Mr. Trump nor Vice President J.D. Vance accepted invitations to the dinner. Other top officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, also declined to attend.
“Nobody went because either we were busy working or we just don’t care to be recognized by that crowd,” a White House official told Politico.
In years past, presidents and vice presidents took turns addressing the dinner, with Mr. Trump himself delivering remarks in 2018. At that dinner, he showed appreciation for the press, thanking them “for all you do to support and sustain our democracy. I mean that. I mean that. Some incredible people in the press.”
This year the administration had no official representative onstage. The sole Cabinet member in attendance was Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, but he wasn’t there to speak for the president.
Gridiron members applauded statements supporting The Associated Press and Voice of America amid the White House barring the AP from events, cutting VOA funding, ejecting HuffPost from the press pool, forcing Reuters and Bloomberg to share access, and stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of pool control.
