Political analyst Mark Halperin criticized the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) on Monday for not acknowledging that booking comedian Amber Ruffin was a significant error in its announcement that she would no longer perform at the association’s annual dinner on April 26.
“[T]he WHCA board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels announced in a March 29 email to the White House press corps, adding that it was an effort to avoid focusing “on the politics of division.” Halperin, on “The Morning Meeting,” argued the WHCA’s announcement omitted an admission of any wrongdoing in hiring the comedian, who has a record of being an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.
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While the WHCA dinner bills itself as nonpartisan, Ruffin criticized Trump and praised former Vice President Kamala Harris in the weeks prior to the 2024 election during an interview with Advocate, an LGBT-interest magazine. For instance, she called Trump “a gross president.”
Ruffin also told CNN host Jake Tapper in February that she did not want the president to attend the dinner.
“The head of the White House Correspondents’ Association … Eugene Daniels, formerly of Politico, now of NBC, announced that they were getting rid of Amber Ruffin, who had been hired to be the comedian,” Halperin said. “She’s avowedly anti-Trump. They tried to get her to be more neutral in her comedy. She declined, so they axed her.”
“They did not fess up to the original sin in announcing the decision, which is they shouldn’t have employed her in the first place,” he continued. “It was a huge mistake and they haven’t fessed up to it. And the press coverage doesn’t take that into account. I consider that to be outrageously bad and stupid.”
Tapper also asked Ruffin if any of the past WHCA dinner hosts had advised her on how to handle the occasion.
“They also said that you have to make fun of everybody. You can’t just make fun of the people you disagree with, you have to spread it out evenly. And I am not going to do that,” Ruffin said as she laughed. “Maybe I will do it a little bit, probably not.”
The move to cancel Ruffin’s performance reverses Daniels’ Feb. 4 announcement naming the comedian as the dinner’s headliner.
“When I began to think about what entertainer would be a perfect fit for the dinner this year, Amber was immediately at the top of my list,” Daniels told the Daily Caller in February.
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