Comic Amber Ruffin cut from White House correspondents' event after
angering Trump team
[April 01, 2025]
By DAVID BAUDER
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.
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Amber Ruffin arrives at the 16th Annual AAFCA Film Awards on
Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly
Hills, Calif. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, file)
 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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