A Trump-less White House Correspondent’s Dinner (WHCD) was a night of both celebrating Washington’s journalist elite and, for some, reflection upon the failure of the D.C. press corps to cover Joe Biden’s frailty throughout his presidency.
The black tie dinner on Saturday featured no host after comedian Amber Ruffin was dropped from the gig only weeks in advance. The focus — beyond the usual party atmosphere — was the state of journalism under Donald Trump’s second administration at a time when the White House is exerting an unprecedented amount of control over Oval Office and briefing room coverage.
Also in focus was the annual awards of scholarships to young reporters and recognition of some members of the press corps for coverage in 2024. ABC’s Rachel Scott was the first to be recognized for her on-the-scene reporting of the Trump rally-turned-assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
But it was the award of the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence to Axios reporter Alex Thompson which provoked a moment of self-reflection for the attending journalists.
NBC’s Kristen Welker, introducing Thompson, quoted the Correspondents Association’s judges to a crowd that cheered his name: “Thompson’s aggressive reporting … revealed [that] the president’s cognitive decline was impacting his ability to do his job, information the White House tried to conceal.”
Thompson himself delivered a brief speech moments later.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception,” said the Axios reporter. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.”
Members of the former Biden/Harris administration have faced tough questions about the extent to which Biden’s cognitive decline was apparent throughout 2024 and before in the wake of the November election. Harris’s brutal defeat across the battleground states followed a sprint to the finish line the vice president only began after taking over Joe Biden’s place at the top of the ticket in July.
The 46th president was forced out of the race after enduring weeks of calls for him to step down. In interviews, Biden has admitted that he is unsure that he was physically capable of serving another four years in office. But a disastrous debate in June at which he appeared soft-spoken to the point of whispering and at times seemed unable to follow what his opponent was saying triggered a series of calls for a new candidate from Democratic members of Congress terrified of polling that projected a bloodbath for the party in November.
Now, the ex-president and members of his former team continue to face scrutiny over why they put up so much resistance to the president stepping aside and allowing a formal Democratic primary process to play out in 2024, while Republicans argue that Biden’s frailties left him unfit for office entirely. Progressives, meanwhile, continue to fume at both their ideological rivals in the party itself as well as the mainstream media for allowing the concealment of those issues displayed by the president to persist as long as they did.
Reporting from The Wall Street Journal in December of 2024 revealed that Biden’s aides and campaign officials first began managing the perception of his stamina and physical capabilities in 2020, when he came from behind after a victory in South Carolina to win the Democratic primary, buoyed in part by a consolidation of support around him.
Thompson, for his part, reported in late June of 2024: “From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.”
“Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.”
The Biden campaign would go on to use the latter reason as an excuse for his disappointing debate performance. But many Democrats (both Biden loyalists and others in the party) continue to feel betrayed and let down by the manner by which Biden was forced to step aside and, in general, the urgency with which the party treated Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign.
