Here’s Why Amber Ruffin Is Glad That the White House Correspondents’ Association Canceled Her
Now that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is all about coddling the White House instead of roasting it, getting kicked out of the gala is officially cooler than getting invited.
Back in February, the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that late-night host and writer Amber Ruffin would be the mistress of ceremonies at this year’s meeting of White House officials and the journalists who are supposed to hold them accountable. Then, barely a month later, the WHCA board voted unanimously to fire Ruffin from the White House Correspondents’ Dinner hosting gig after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich publicly expressed his outrage about Ruffin making some extremely mild criticisms of the Trump administration on a podcast.
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While Ruffin’s firing left the 2025 White House Correspondent Dinner a dull, toothless banquet that President Trump still refused to attend, it also gave Ruffin more confidence than ever in the importance of her message: Don’t let Trump teach you to hate. Ruffin listed the lessons she learned from the WHCD during her talk with another comedian who had more balls than the entire WHCA put together on yesterday’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:
Colbert, whose performance at the 2006 WHCD while in-character as his conservative Colbert Report persona scandalized the late-years Bush Administration and set the standard for satirizing the political elite at the black-tie event, pointed out that Ruffin being too sharp-elbowed for the newly spineless WHCA is actually a huge flex. Colbert told Ruffin that getting fired from the dinner “might be cooler than getting invited.”
As Ruffin told Colbert, the origin of the WHCA’s discontent with her as a hosting pick started when she admitted that it would be hard to be a fence-sitter and roast both sides of the aisle equally, as the WHCA had instructed her to do, when the Trump administration is deporting American citizens to foreign prisons without due process. Even though Ruffin stuck to her guns on this valuable point, the loss of the job still stung. “I was really, really sad for, like, two hours,” Ruffin said of the WHCA’s decision to give her the ax. “But, then, I had a brunch, so then I felt great.”
“I thought, if they didn’t want me doing that show before I had even opened my mouth, then they would have been really, really sad with what they got,” Ruffin said of the conclusion she came to after the dust had settled on her would-be hosting gig. “And then, also, after they fired me, I looked back at my Google Doc and was like, ‘Oooh, this would have been bad.’ They would not have liked it.”
While Ruffin refused to reveal the roasts she had planned for her WHCD performance that would have incensed the media elite who have chosen capitulation to power over proper coverage, she did reveal what would have been her closing remarks, saying, “This administration is trying to get you to hate other people, and that’s not your natural state. Human beings are made to love one another.”
“They got you by convincing you that you’re filled with hate and you absolutely aren’t. It’s the opposite of what you’re made for,” Ruffin recited. “And, saying that out loud now makes me glad that I got canceled.”
It should make Ruffin’s fans glad, too — making comments like that in front of Trump officials is just about the easiest method of winning a one-way ticked to El Salvador.
