Donald Trump plans rally against White House Correspondents Dinner; airtime move?

In just one week, one of our favorite annual TV traditions is taking place in the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s a chance to celebrate the media and exceptional journalists. Has the event in recent years become a little bit too much like a low-rent Academy Awards with reality stars showing up at networks’ requests? Certainly, but we do think that there is still merit and value to the work that many of these reporters do.

Clearly, President Trump doesn’t agree. He had already announced that he would not be taking part in the dinner this year (which is going to feature a performance from a Daily Show correspondent — read more here). Now, we are also haring that he is taking his rebellion further and actually taking part in one of his famous / infamous rallies on the same exact day.

In a post on Twitter, Trump confirmed that he will be hosting a “BIG” (would this guy use any other adjective for it?) rally at the same time as the Dinner in Philadelphia, a move that may force some journalists away from it in order to provide coverage. You can call it what you will, but it seems like a deliberate move on his part to take TV time away from a group looking to celebrate their own achievements in one of the only venues that they can.

For what it’s worth, Jeff Mason, the President of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the following per the New York Times after hearing about Trump’s plans: “We will be celebrating the First Amendment at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner next week, and we look forward to doing just that.”

For the record, we anticipate that the Correspondents’ Dinner is going to be even more contentious than usual, and that Trump will probably be spending some time after the fact really slamming the dinner and trying to use whatever humor is thrown at him as justification that the media is fake. Some things are simply rather easy to figure out here.

Ultimately, we’ll be covering the dinner from afar in the same way that we always do, and we figure that the majority of our own personal coverage will be geared around C-SPAN as the broadcaster. They are one of the few who we think will not cut away from the event if something else happens.

Do you think networks should take away TV time from the Correspondents’ Dinner for a Trump rally? Share below. (Photo: CNN.)