Following a few years of proverbial snoozing while on the job and a 2025 celebrating itself for waking up at the last possible moment to Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) returned to form Monday with plenty of Trump bashing in its 2026 awards ahead of their April 25 dinner (which will be another pompous display of their Hindenburg-sized egos).
The WCHA gushed in a press release the awards spotlighted “[g]roundbreaking reporting about the first year of President Trump’s second term” and “subjects as the exercise of power in the White House, loyalty of civil servants to a new administration, a dramatic meeting in the Oval Office with the president of Ukraine, and the late Jeffrey Epstein.”
All told, five of the six categories went to anti-Trump reporting. And the six? Trump was spared given its scope as, per its name, The Collier Prize for State Government Accountability. That went to Minneapolis’s NBC affiliate for stories on fraud in Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program.
Starting with the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, the WHCA selected The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey for a series of reports blasting personnel in the second Trump administration.
The submissions included concerns about “special government employees,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s “supersize role” on economic issues, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s “outsize[d] role” in everything, President Trump feeling “emboldened to” stress America’s institutions, then-Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair’s “enormous influence,” and how Trump was swayed to relax marijuana restrictions.
Annually split in two to recognize both print and TV, the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure went to Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller for this doozy that sent the liberal press into a hyperventilating tail spin: “Trump team is questioning civil servants at National Security Council about commitment to his agenda”.
Their January 13 missive began this way (click “expand”):
Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
At least some of these nonpolitical employees have begun packing up their belongings since being asked about their loyalty to Trump — after they had earlier been given indications that they would be asked to stay on at the NSC in the new administration, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
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A wholesale removal of foreign policy and national security experts from the NSC on Day 1 of the new administration could deprive Trump’s team of considerable expertise and institutional knowledge at a time when the U.S. is grappling with difficult policy challenges in Ukraine, the Mideast and beyond. Such questioning could also make new policy experts brought in to the NSC less likely to speak up about policy differences and concerns.
The TV award went to CNN’s The Source host, chief White House correspondent, and former conservative reporter Kaitlan Collins for her on-air reporting following the explosive February 28, 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
So, on both occasions, it’s negative, drama-filled news about the administration, not policy.
The winning photo went to Andrew Harnik of Getty Images, showing Trump standing up and staring off into the distance while, just feet away, a guest from the pharmaceutical industry had collapsed. The implication, of course, was that Trump didn’t care what had just happened.
The most absurd and partisan decision the WHCA judges made was for The Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability, which went to eight reporters at The Wall Street Journal for its now-infamous, sleazy piece about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, arguing a birthday card the latter had sent to the former was proof they were close, personal friends.
Of course, this gave the BlueSky Brigade all the proof they needed to make the jump from friends to fellow pedophiles.
The last category listed by the WHCA will be handed out at the dinner — determined independently by “the Arkansas-based Center for Integrity in News Reporting” with the award being of the same name.
That went to The New York Times’s Tyler Pager for stories investigating political donor Timothy Mellon donating money to cover pay for troops during last year’s government shutdown, the fallout of the Trump-Zelenskyy blow-up, Trump demanding $230 million from his own Justice Department, a testy Trump call with India’s Narendra Modi, and the Trump administration’s final attempts at negotiation with Nicholas Maduro before his January 3 capture.
