politics

The shocking reason for Trump's decision to skip the Correspondents’ Dinner is uncovered.

On Saturday, Donald Trump announced he would not be attending the White House’s annual Correspondents’ Association dinner.

“I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year,” he tweeted.

“Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!”

"Oh, so sorry, I'm...busy that night".

Reporters from the biggest news organisations attend the annual dinner, which is also frequented by celebrities and features performances from comedians.

The President usually attends every year...except if you are Donald Trump and you want to RSVP 'no' to your own party a full two months before the event (this year's dinner is currently scheduled for April 29).

While President Trump didn't offer any further explanation as to why he would not be able to attend, one of his aide's has said it's because he wasn't elected to "pretend" to like reporters.

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"I think it's kind of naive of us to think that we can all walk into a room for a couple of hours and pretend that some of that tension isn't there," Sarah Huckabee Sanders told ABC’s This Week.

donald trump media
"FAKE NEWS". Image: Getty.

Trump has made no secret of the fact that some mainstream media outlets are not his favourite. He's openly called some members of the press "the enemy", and reporters from The New York Times and CNN were recently excluded from a briefing by presidential press secretary Sean Spicer.

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Sanders said that Trump was unable to pretend the hostility between the President and the press doesn't exist.

"There’s no reason for him to go in and sit and pretend like this is going to be just another Saturday night," she said.

"One of the things we say in the South [is] if a Girl Scout egged your house, would you buy cookies from her? I think that this is a pretty similar scenario.

"This wasn’t a president elected to spend his time with reporters and celebrities, this is a president who campaigned on speaking directly to Americans, and that’s what he’s going to spend his time doing," she said.

Trump will be the first president to skip the annual scholarship dinner since 1981, when Ronald Reagan wasn't able to attend after recovering from an assassination attempt.