The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner with President Donald Trump that was disrupted earlier this year when a gunman charged past Secret Service agents toward the event is scheduled to be re-held in a different, smaller and more secure venue Friday night.Subscribe to read this story ad-freeGet unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Trump and a number of his top officials will again be on hand for the dinner, which was rescheduled after the April event ended in chaos.Trump is scheduled to speak.“The president’s speech will be a combination of unifying yet vicious, and serious yet hilarious, all at the same time, if you can imagine that,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News on Friday.
“One thing I can assure you, it will be entertaining.”A senior White House official told NBC News earlier this week that “it’s safe to say” that Trump will “briefly address” the April violence in his remarks.As of Tuesday, his team had not gone over the speech, but the official expected that the president would include some of the jokes written for the earlier dinner that he never got to deliver.Trump said in April that he had been planning to tear into the press.“I don’t know if I could ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said at the White House shortly after the dinner was evacuated.
“I think I’m going to be probably very nice.I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.” The gala is being held at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria — formerly the Trump International Hotel — rather than the Washington Hilton, where the dinner had been held every year since 1972.
The change was made after prosecutors say a heavily armed man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, rushed through a security checkpoint in an apparent effort to make it to the ballroom where the event was being held.Allen was arrested after allegedly exchanging gunfire with ...