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Trump’s Ridiculous Ballroom Is No Place for Journalists

The president keeps suggesting that reporters have a party on his home turf. That’s a terrible idea.

Donald Trump speaks during a press conference in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on April 25, 2026.

In the wake of the assassination attempt on President Trump, DC outsiders might sense a veiled threat at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s long-standing insistence on having its annual gala at the Washington Hilton. After all, this is the hotel where, in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. tried to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan—not an association you’d think Beltway bigwigs would want to embrace. In reality, the so-called “Hinckley Hilton” is one of the only spaces in Washington big enough to host a dinner of 2,000 people or more. That the grounds might remember violence is an accident of history, even if what happened should at least ever-so-faintly rhyme with the ideal White House–press corps relationship.

Not that any reporter covering any president wants violence; rather, the metaphor of who is actually welcome at the dinner should appeal to castle-doctrine-loving MAGA Republicans. When the president is invited to dinner by the press at the Hilton, they’re sending a message: You’re on our turf and at our pleasure; the invitation can be rescinded.

There is power in an invite, as the proprietor of Mar-a-Lago surely knows.

Now, after last weekend’s incident, Trump and his MAGA allies have been pushing for future White House Correspondents’ Association dinners to be held on his turf, at the still-mythical ballroom that the president tore down part of the White House to build. But this is a solution to a problem that does not exist.

For one thing, the security cordon at the Hilton did not fail. The would-be assassin was brought down at the very first barricade he met. It is not even clear he got off more than a single shot (it’s not even clear that he hit someone). The Secret Service determined how close to the president they’d allow someone with a gun to get. That’s where they put the magnetometers. That’s where Cole Allen was stopped. The system functioned exactly as it should.

But Trump has never met a functioning system that he didn’t try to break—and the real impetus for his suggestion to take the dinner in-house is not security, but control.

The metaphor of watchful hospitality should be on everyone’s mind every time Trump or his cronies bleat about moving the correspondents’ dinner to his metastasizing monstrosity, because the change of venue would reverse the current roles entirely: The press, nominally celebrating........

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