The event, originally held in April, had to be rescheduled after a gunman opened fire.
Trump said today that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin personally assured him they would not provide weapons to Iran.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Xi told him during their recent meeting in Beijing that China would not “under any circumstances” give or sell weapons to Iran, including through Chinese companies.
Trump also said Putin informed him that Russia would not sell weapons to Tehran.
“Considering our relationship, I take him at his word,” Trump wrote of Xi, adding that if either country were to arm Iran, “it would be very bad for them.”
Trump’s comments come as U.S. officials have raised concerns about China and Russia’s broader role in supporting Iran’s military capabilities.
NBC News reported in May that Russia was providing Iran with intelligence about the location of U.S. forces in the Middle East and that a U.S. F-15 fighter was likely struck down by a Chinese-made shoulder-launched missile.
DNC rules committee members voted to recommend South Carolina and Nevada retain the ability to hold a presidential primary contest in the early, pre-Super Tuesday window, an expected development ahead of a likely clash over which state will get to go first.
The members already voted to recommend New Hampshire and Michigan to be granted waivers to hold primaries in the early window. The party could recommend two more states join the fray too.
Much of the discussion on the sidelines, however, has been about South Carolina and Nevada, which are duking it out, along with New Hampshire, to get the right to go first.
The powerful Democratic National Committee’s rules committee just voted to recommend Michigan as the Midwestern state allowed to hold an early presidential nominating process in 2028, dealing a massive blow to Iowa’s hopes of continuing to hold an early contest.
Iowa received no support from the room of DNC members who instead almost unanimously chose Michigan to be one of the six states to hold an early contest.
The DNC will ultimately pick one state from each of its four regions and another two from anywhere across the country. It’s possible Iowa could win one of those at-large spots, but it has been on the defensive ever since a botched 2020 Iowa caucus — in which a series of technological failures delayed the results — and amid movement among some Democrats to elevate more racially diverse states prompted change in 2024.
New Hampshire retained its ability to hold a Democratic presidential primary contest in the early window before Super Tuesday, after the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee voted to recommend it receive a waiver allowing it to stay in the party’s early nominating window.
It was a sweep for the Granite State, as the few committee members who raised their hands to vote for the only other state from the East region, Delaware, quickly put their hands down when it became clear New Hampshire had the overwhelming support of the body.
But while New Hampshire is set to remain an early nominating state for Democrats, it’s not clear whether DNC members will allow it to continue holding its “First in the Nation” primary. Once the committee selects the states that will be in this early window, it will then vote to decide the order, and who gets the top prize: the right to go first.
The Democratic National Committee’s rules committee is meeting in a Washington, D.C., hotel today in the hopes of picking which states will be allowed to hold the first nominating contests of the 2028 Democratic presidential campaign.
Before deciding on which states will fill those slots, committee members unanimously approved a motion to increase the number of states allowed to hold contests before Super Tuesday to six. Previously, the party had been expected to grant waivers for five states to hold those early contests.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will depart for Washington on Monday and meet with Trump on Tuesday, his office said in a statement.
Netanyahu will also “attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, a friend of Israel,” on Tuesday, the statement said.
The visit comes as Trump weighs next steps amid the impasse in talks with Iran and as the U.S. mediates negotiations to end the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon.
As the U.S. and Iran return to a daily drumbeat of attacks across the Middle East, hundreds of American diplomats and their families sit in limbo, uncertain when — or whether — they will return to their homes and schools.
Read the full story here.
Billionaire GOP donor Ken Griffin is contributing $10 million to Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who is the overwhelming favorite to get his party’s nomination, two people familiar with the donation told NBC News.
Rep. Byron Donalds speaks at the Capitol in February. Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images file
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The U.S. trade representative announced a wave of tariffs on dozens of economies yesterday to replace Trump’s temporary 10% tariff, which expired at midnight ET.
Sixty trading partners, including all of America’s most important ones, will face tariffs of 10% to 12.5%, according to a fact sheet. The new duties took effect at 12:01 a.m. ET today.
Some of the trading partners facing a 10% tariff include Canada, Mexico, India and the United Kingdom.
Read the full story here.
The program at tonight’s dinner will be “very much the same” as the original event in April, but not everything else will be, the White House Correspondents’ Association president, Weijia Jiang, told CSPAN.
“What will be different is the size,” Jiang said. “It’s a much more intimate gathering.”
The Waldorf Astoria venue is a much smaller venue than the Washington Hilton ballroom, holding about 700 people compared to more than 3,000, respectively.
People magazine reported that tonight’s dinner is “capped at around 680 people — roughly one-quarter of the size” of the April dinner.
Like last time, the program includes WHCA award winners and scholarship recipients, including this year’s lifetime achievement honorees. And of course we still expect to hear from the president, who is scheduled to give remarks at 8:55 p.m. Mentalist Oz Pearlman will return as this year’s entertainment.
The United States launched a fresh barrage of strikes on Iran overnight as Trump threatened a major new escalation after Tehran opened a second front in its pressure campaign on the world economy.
Trump was weighing whether to launch a “massive attack” on the Islamic Republic that would be “bigger than ever before,” he told Axios on Thursday. The president’s warning, followed hours later by a 13th night of military strikes, came as oil briefly surged above $100 a barrel.
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On the president’s remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner tonight, a senior White House official told NBC News that “it’s safe to say he’ll briefly address” the shooting at the first dinner in April.
As of Tuesday, the team had not gone over the speech, but the official expected the president would include some of the jokes that had been previously written but that he never got to deliver.
A person familiar with the draft who cautioned final remarks are subject to change — and to whatever the president wants to say — said the speech includes a reference to the networks that didn’t air Trump’s election integrity speech in full last week.
A federal judicial panel has allowed Tennessee to use a new congressional map that breaks apart a majority-Black district in Memphis, providing another legal victory for Republicans who hope to gain an additional seat in this year’s midterm elections.
A three-judge panel yesterday declined to issue a preliminary injunction against the new districts, paving the way for them to be used in the Aug. 6 primary elections. Tennessee had revised its congressional districts in May, shortly after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minorities
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Hundreds of journalists signed onto a new letter this week urging the White House Correspondent’s Association to use the rescheduled event tonight to hold Trump accountable for his repeated attacks against the media.
“We believe it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it. We urge the WHCA to condemn the administration’s actions from the podium and pledge to fight all attempts by his administration to undermine this core pillar of a functioning democracy,” the new letter said.
The letter published Tuesday reiterates pleas made in a letter signed by hundreds of journalists ahead of the initial dinner in April, asking the association to stand up to Trump and arguing that the dinner “cannot be business as usual.”
The new letter said that since the dinner’s original date, “the administration’s attacks on journalists and press freedom have become even more egregious.”
“The President’s Department of Justice has subpoenaed journalists and their phone records. President Trump has threatened to revoke licenses of broadcasters who refuse to acquiesce to his demands,” the letter said.
The letter cited the Justice Department’s subpoenas of New York Times journalists, which the DOJ agreed to withdraw yesterday after facing pushback from a federal judge. It also highlighted an order from the Federal Communications Commission that ABC stations seek early renewals of broadcast licenses after Trump told the network to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made on air.
It also detailed numerous occasions when Trump disparaged and name-called journalists, particularly women journalists, by calling more than one “stupid” and “a disgrace.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association is scheduled to hold a smaller version of its annual dinner tonight after the first was derailed when a gunman charged past Secret Service agents guarding its entrance.
The dinner will be held at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria rather than the Washington Hilton, where the dinner has been held every year since 1972.
The guest list for tonight’s event will be much slimmer than the original. Between costs and space constraints — the Waldorf Astoria is home to a much smaller ballroom than the Hilton — the dinner will only host about 680 people, rather than the 2,600 guests invited to the April event.
The WHCA added two awards to the docket for tonight’s event, honoring both Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzales, who confronted the gunman as he attempted to charge into the ballroom, and the staff of the Washington Hilton with the “President’s Award for Exceptional Service to the WHCA.”
Alongside the awards to Gonzales and the Hilton staff, the association will finish the program that was interrupted in April. The association said the event will include a “salute to the First Amendment in 250 years of American history, awards honoring groundbreaking reporting now, a salute to scholarship winners” as well as remarks by Trump and entertainment by mentalist Oz Pearlman.
The April dinner marked the third known assassination attempt against Trump. The rescheduled event comes after the Secret Service said Wednesday that it opened more than 10,000 investigations this year into threats against the people it protects, marking a 40% jump from the same period last year.
Secret Service Director Sean Curran pointed to a volatile political climate that has reached a new level when briefing reporters this week, saying that threat numbers are “off the charts.”
NBC News