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Donald Trump will attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner tonight, becoming the first president to break a boycott that he himself maintained throughout his entire first term (2017-2021) and also last year.
The president will be accompanied by the First Lady, Melania Trump, to the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C., where this gala is held every last Saturday of April, bringing together over 2,000 guests: the vice president, members of the government, Congress, and the diplomatic corps.
In March, Trump announced that he had accepted the "kind" invitation from the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA), justifying his previous rejections by arguing that the press had been "extraordinarily tough" on him.
A decisive factor in his change of stance is that this year the guest artist is not a comedian who satirizes the president, but the mentalist Oz Pearlman, an Emmy winner, who promises a show of mental reading and interaction with the audience.
The experience that marked Trump's relationship with this event dates back to April 30, 2011, when he attended as a private guest during Barack Obama's presidency and was the target of direct jokes from both the then-president and comedian Seth Meyers.
Obama took advantage of the fact that Hawaii had released his birth certificate that same day to mock Trump's conspiracy theories, while Meyers quipped: "Donald Trump has said he will run as a Republican, which is surprising because I assumed he would run as a joke."
Trump described that event as "rough and rude," and that experience influenced his decision not to attend during his first term.
The gala takes place amidst heightened tension between Trump and the media, which he accuses of creating "fake news" in their coverage of the war with Iran.
The president has filed million-dollar defamation lawsuits against The New York Times, CBS, ABC News, and BBC, among other media outlets.
The paradox of the night will be particularly evident with The Wall Street Journal: during the dinner, an award will be presented for its exclusive report on an obscene congratulatory message that Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, precisely the publication against which the president has a $10 billion lawsuit that a federal judge dismissed on April 13, though he granted a deadline until April 27 to amend it.
The WHCA, founded in 1914, held its first dinner in 1921, and since President Calvin Coolidge's attendance in 1924, all presidents have participated at some point, with Trump being the most prolonged exception in the history of the event.
The White House anticipated that the president's speech will be "very entertaining," according to a report from the EFE agency on Friday.
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