Comedian Amber Ruffin will no longer headline the 2025 White House Correspondents Association dinner, WHCA president Eugene Daniels told members on Saturday. In fact, no one will.
In a letter, first made public by CNN analyst Brian Stelter, Daniels said the WHCA board voted unanimously to abandon a comedic headlining act entirely, which he asserted was to “ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.”
WHCA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TheWrap. Ruffin has not commented publicly. The 2025 WHCA Dinner takes place Saturday, April 26.
The news comes about 14 hours after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich complained bitterly about Ruffin’s political jokes in a social media post, referring to her as a “2nd rate comedian” and demanding that journalists skip the WHCD dinner, which he called a “hate-filled and violence-inspiring event.”
However, according to Stelter, “this change was already in the works” and Budowich’s complaining played no role in the decision to cancel Ruffin’s headlining performance.
If that’s the case, Ruffin doesn’t appear to have known about that discussion, as the material Budowhich complained about came from her appearance on Thursday’s episode of the Daily Beast podcast, as seen below:
Ruffin was announced as the WHCA Dinner headliner in February. “She has the ability to walk the line between blistering commentary and humor all while provoking her audience to think about the important issues of the day. I’m thrilled and honored she said yes,” Daniels said at the time.
This year’s event comes during a particularly rough time for the organization, which has been increasingly redundant since Donald Trump took office in January.
Trump of course steadily escalated attacks on independent media, most notably on Feb. 14 when he banned the Associated Press from the White House because the organization refuses to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” 11 days later, the administration shut the WHCA out entirely by taking full control over the White House press pool.
Since then, the WHCA has struggled to define itself, declining to call for a unified response to these conflicts and largely staying out of AP’s legal battle with the Trump administration over that ban. On Wednesday, a month and a half after the ban, WHCA finally asked members to show “solidarity” for AP — by wearing pins that say “First Amendment” at the white house or on TV, adding a First Amendment graphic to their social media profiles, or supporting AP in person at court. Though just for a day.
In March Ruffin mocked Trump over the AP Ban, saying in part, “I saw he banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office because they kept saying Gulf of Mexico. And I was like, what? Now you care about deadnaming. Fine. Well, I’m going to start renaming stuff, too.”
