Donald Trump Will Skip White House Correspondents' Dinner For Second Year In A Row

President Donald Trump, who has been criticized for an apparent lack of consistency between past statements and later actions, it sticking to his guns on one issue. The vocally anti-media president will, once again, sit out the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner later this month. Trump said as much during a Friday morning segment on WABC radio’s “Bernie and Sid in the Morning.”

The announcement was followed by negative comments about the mainstream press, per the New York Daily News. Trump also skipped last year’s edition of “nerd prom,” becoming the first president since Ronald Reagan in 1981 to sit out the event where journalists and politicians dress up and listen to jokes about the president.

Reagan, of course, was recovering from an assassination attempt when he skipped the dinner that year.

The White House provided a statement to CNN confirming the news, but said other members of the administration would be present, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Trump’s negative RSVP came on the heels of another spat with a mainstream media outlet, namely the Washington Post. The president spent Thursday tweeting his displeasure with the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper’s headlines about the White House’s China tariff policies. He was actually a guest at the dinner on behalf of the Post in 2011.

According to the Daily News, Trump held a rally in lieu of attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2017. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter both skipped multiple correspondents’ dinners, but after Reagan’s assassination attempt, United States presidents attended every dinner for 36 consecutive years.