- President Biden will attend this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
- His attendance marks his return to a presidential tradition where the commander-in-chief is roasted.
- Trump never attended a dinner and once banned other administration officials from doing so.
President Joe Biden is set to prove that he can take a joke by attending this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner, breaking with Donald Trump's repeated snubs of an event that often turns into a light roasting of the current White House.
The correspondents association on Wednesday announced Biden and first lady Jill Biden's expected attendance. Comedian and Comedy Central host Trevor Noah is set to headline the glitzy affair on April 30.
Biden's attendance also comes after a surge of COVID-19 cases connected to the Gridiron Dinner, a more exclusive Washington social event that the president did not attend. Two Cabinet officials, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who were both in attendance, later tested positive.
Before Trump, every president since Calvin Coolidge attended at least one of the correspondents' association dinners. Trump made it a point to not attend, going so far as to host counter-programming by rallying with his supporters. In 2019, the Trump administration banned any of its officials from attending that year's dinner. No dinner was held in 2020 or 2021 due to the pandemic.
"This is not [Trump's] dinner — it is ours," then WHCA president Olivier Knox said during a more staid dinner. "And it should stay ours."
Comedian Michelle Wolf's jokes about then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2018, prompted calls for an apology from some Republican officials.
Before Trump, President Barack Obama appeared to relish the evening.
Obama often touched on topics his White House loathed to address, such as in 2011 when he mocked Trump, then the host of NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice," after Trump helped spread the racist lie that Obama might not be an American citizen.
"But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience," Obama said, mocking Trump who was in the room. "For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of 'Celebrity Apprentice' — at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled."