Trump skips White House Correspondents’ dinner, holds rally in Wisconsin
US President Donald Trump has, for the third time, skipped the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner and instead held a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
The president had also directed other administration officials not to attend the event which was held on Saturday night.
"The correspondents’ dinner is too negative. I like positive things," Trump said earlier this month.
Historian Ron Chernow, who gave a speech at the event, ran through a list of achievements made by journalists in history, saying, "This is a glorious tradition, you folks are a part of it and we can't have politicians trampling on it with impunity."
He also told a joke comparing Trump to George Washington, saying, "Clearly deficient at the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle at the lowly title of 'Father of his Country.'"
Chernow was alluding to Trump's book "The Art of the Deal."
"Like every great president, Washington felt maligned and misunderstood the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta," Chernow added.
Olivier Knox, the president of White House Correspondents' Association, who spoke first, said, "This night is ours" and it is not about Trump.
Concurrent with the all three White House Correspondents' Association dinners during Trump’s presidency, the president held counter-programming rallies.
The other two rallies were held in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both swing states like Wisconsin.
In Wisconsin, Trump attacked the media again. He rattled off a list of record or near-record unemployment figures, pointing to the press section and telling the audience that he had to parse his words cautiously.
“If I make any misstatement, if I'm off by just a little tiny bit, those people back there will be – headlines!” he said.
“So I have to be very careful. Fake news. They're fake! They are fake. They are fakers!”
Trump frequently accuses major media organizations like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post of bias, but strongly favors news outlets that provide glowing coverage such as Fox News, the Daily Caller, Newsmax and Sinclair, a group of almost 200 local TV stations.
Trump attended the dinner in 2011, where he was repeatedly mocked and teased by then-President Barack Obama.
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