Even after President Donald Trump secretly put White House reporters in grave danger, the White House Correspondents’ Association is already confirming that he has been invited to next year’s dinner.
This year’s dinner, which was rescheduled after a gunman attempted to storm the venue, was filled with vile insults from Trump toward reporters, including CNN star Kaitlan Collins. It left many questioning why White House reporters need to get quite so cozy with the officials they cover, particularly at an event this lavish.
Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich began her one-year term leading the association after this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, taking over from CBS’s Weijia Jiang. In an interview with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, Heinrich, 37, dismissed criticism of the dinner and confirmed that it will continue, with the president essentially already having an invitation.
“This dinner precedes President Trump. It will continue after President Trump. And we will invite the president no matter who the president is every year,” she said.
In the same answer, she appeared to dismiss Trump’s foul insults directed at Collins, as she said it’s just something White House correspondents hear every day.
“For reporters who actually cover the White House and are in front of the president on a daily basis, the stuff that we heard that day is not a shock to us,” she said. “This is someone we cover closely. Any number of us have had him push back or snap at a question that we’ve asked or made a comment.”
Trump also insulted Heinrich during the dinner, saying she looks “so beautiful, but she can be so nasty.” During Trump’s rant, she just smiled and shrugged onstage.
She added that Trump “already said he’s going to come next year.” The dinner is already planned to be hosted at the Washington Hilton, the hotel where the original ill-fated dinner took place and where it has happened for nearly 60 years. She noted that if Trump’s people “want to complain about it, that’s fine, but it’s happening.”
When asked about criticism from other White House correspondents, including the New York Times’ Peter Baker, who said it is “time to rethink the dinner,” Heinrich dismissed them as people who just don’t get what it’s like to cover Trump.
“As far as the calls before the dinner to cancel the dinner and not give him a platform, I would point out that there was not a single member of the White House Correspondents’ Association on the letter, and I don’t think anyone who had covered the beat in recent years,” she said.
“And Peter Baker, I mean, The New York Times stopped buying tickets to this dinner like 20 years ago,” she added, more pointedly. “We have our sort of regular usual complainers who have their perspective on what this dinner is and whether it should happen. And we expect that.”
Baker is still the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent. His Times biography says he has been covering the White House since 1996, spanning six presidencies.
Heinrich began covering the White House for Fox News in 2021, after joining the conservative cable news channel in 2018.
Heinrich noted that she hoped the dinner could still be seen as “a recognition of the importance of the First Amendment, the role of the free press, the work that we do in service of the First Amendment, recognizing excellent journalism, and also awarding scholarships to the next generation of people who want to do what we are doing.”
“I thought it was valuable to have him taking part in a tradition that recognizes the importance of the free press,” she reiterated. “And we will continue to hold this dinner when he’s out of office.”
The purpose of the dinner has also been questioned in light of bombshell reporting from the Washington Post that the president and his team essentially duped the press and potentially put reporters in harm’s way after he secretly chose not to fly with the press pool and several administration officials after facing an Iranian threat on his way back to Washington from Turkey last month.
When asked by New York Magazine to address those concerns, Heinrich explained that she went to the White House to explain that “we don’t want, as news organizations, to be unwittingly transmitting false information and then not have an opportunity afterward to correct the record.”
“The reporters obviously were more concerned about having felt like they were in a threatening situation, and that’s also a concern for their managers,” she explained.
She was also asked more directly whether she felt her role in leading the Correspondents’ Association was now “to reassure them that when they’re getting on a plane, presumably with the president, that they’re going to be as safe as possible.”
Heinrich said she was “not in a position to assure them of that.”
“My job is to assure our members that I’m advocating for them—whether it’s a concern about their safety, a concern about access, a concern about being able to report accurate information—that I’m hearing all those things and then bringing all those things to the White House,” she elaborated. “I would never want to make a promise that I can’t keep.”
