On Saturday, HuffPost will attend the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner in Washington, D.C. This year’s event comes amid a sustained government assault on the federal workforce and the press, both without precedent in the United States.
Trump seeks to use the power of the state to meddle in CBS News ― and appears to be succeeding. The White House has blocked access to The Associated Press for the crime of calling the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of Mexico.” College students fear being kicked out of the U.S. because of op-eds they have written. Prominent conservatives have salivated at the thought of denaturalizing and deporting a journalist.
HuffPost has been targeted, too. Weeks after eliciting Trump’s rage by asking pertinent questions aboard Air Force One, the Trump administration blocked HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte from a scheduled press pool appearance, in an act that broke with decades of precedent. After a sustained outcry, HuffPost was granted access the following month.
To highlight the Trump administration’s scorched-earth attack on vital government functions and its workers, HuffPost is bringing guests to this year’s dinner who have experienced the fallout firsthand:
- Hampton Dellinger, a federal watchdog in charge of protecting whistleblowers whom Trump fired just one year into a five-year term
- Rohit Chopra, who headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until Trump fired him as part of a larger government purge
- Andrew Bivins, a USAID employee who was fired from the government as part of DOGE’s cuts
A free press is a necessary, if hardly sufficient, bulwark to fend off the threat of authoritarianism. This weekend, we honor the countless journalists who inform Americans and expose truths that some would rather keep hidden. And we thank you for helping to sustain us everyday ― by reading our coverage, by sharing it with people in your life, and by supporting us directly.