White House correspondents' dinner, redux: New venue, fewer guests, and a presidential speech

Three months after a gunman upended the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, guests at the rescheduled event arrived Friday to markedly tighter security, a much smaller guest list, a more relaxed dress code -- and expectations of a confrontational presidential speech teased by his press secretary as 'unifying yet vicious.' The rescheduled dinner was taking place in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, a smaller venue that held only about 700 people. Guests entered via a single entrance, through two ID checks and past a detection dog, armed officers and security guards. There was no red carpet and no separate cocktail receptions preceding the dinner. President Donald Trump entered the ballroom to polite applause, and was thanked for his support by WHCA president Weijia Jiang of CBS News. 'Let's try this again,' Jiang quipped, welcoming the crowd. The White House press corps, she noted, 'always has a follow-up.' Turning serious, she referred back to the trauma and confusion of the original dinner in April. 'Tonight our message is this: We are back,' she said. 'We will not be intimidated. We refuse to let an act of violence have the final word.' As guests settled in for dinner, the biggest question remained what the event's most prominent guest would bring to the table. Would he, in the words of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, be somehow both unifying and vicious? He was widely expected to bring the fighting words ('rather nasty,' he said) against the press that he'd planned to deliver in April -- before the event descended into chaos when a gunman stormed a security checkpoint, forcing an evacuation of the room. 'The president looks forward to finishing what he started,' Leavitt said on Thursday. Besides the pared-down approach, there was another change at Friday's dinner: two additional awards. One will be presented to Victor Gonzales, the Secret Service agent who was staffing a security checkpoint in April and was struck in his protective vest. A second award was to be presented to the staff of the Washington Hilton hotel. The dress code this time is a looser 'black tie optional,' and dinner includes grilled peach and burrata salad, lobster, and beef Wellington. Jiang and her fellow board members worked hard to bring about this WHCA dinner 2.0, not wanting to let a violent act -- or the image of colleagues hiding under tables -- remain the final thought.