A joke, right? After all, that’s what the White House Correspondents Association dinner is all about.
President Donald Trump, appearing at the rescheduled festivities, announced plans for a fourth run for the White House.
Constitutionally, presidents are allowed two election victories.
But his joke targeted the 2020 election, where Joe Biden was declared the winner, but since then there’s been a flood of evidence of possible fraud, including hundreds of thousands of foreigners and dead people on states’ voter rolls.
Further, the 2020 race saw undue influences from Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to hand out $400 million plus to local elections officials who often used it to recruit voters in Democrat districts. And the FBI decided to interfere by calling the Biden scandals documented in a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden Russian disinformation when agents knew at the time they were true.
Trump, of course, has adopted election integrity as one of his goals during his second term, calling on Congress to adopt the SAVE America Act that would have voters provide identification in order to register and vote.
Trump said, “We are doing good together. That why tonight to show just how much I care about the press and, I want to save your ratings, and … announce my intention to, and this is somewhat of a scoop, my intention to run for a fourth term as president of the United States. I will be doing that. I will be having an official (pulls out Trump 2028 hat) I won three times. I’m going to do it again.”
He added, “I’m getting very good at running for president.”
President Trump on running for fourth term: “I won three times, now I’m going to do it again.” pic.twitter.com/e5hRBxMG5z
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 25, 2026
The first association dinner, in April, was upended when an armed assailant rushed through a security checkpoint and the U.S. Secret Service opened fire on the gunman.
Trump’s relationship with the legacy media represented at in the association has been fraught with conflicts. He routinely excoriates leftists in the media, who have by a large majority adopted clearly anti-Trump agendas in their reporting and commentary.
In fact, he said the crowd had “a lot of people that I like, some I don’t like at all, but I respect most of them.”
He also joked about his importance to the press, as a subject for their negative reporting, “You people have no idea how lucky you are. When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished.”
Security was heightened because of the attempted assassination at the first.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran told reporters in a briefing Wednesday that every venue is reevaluated before every presidential visit.
“We will always evaluate every site, and right now we have an advance team there, and they will take back, and they will set up a plan to set that site up for success, just like we did at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Hilton,” Curran said. “That is a success.”
