With Trump Absent, White House Correspondents’ Dinner Celebrated Biden Bashing

The White House Correspondents’ Association handed out major awards to journalists Saturday evening for critical coverage of former President Joe Biden.

During the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner the organization handed out the print award for presidential news coverage to the Associated Press’s (AP) Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller for their coverage of the Biden White House’s alteration of official White House transcripts.

Biden, following a comedian at a Trump rally joking that Puerto Rico was an island full of garbage, said “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The White House then altered the transcript, turning “supporters” into “supporter’s’” with an apostrophe. (RELATED: White House Officially Claims Biden Has Made 148 Mistakes During 2024 Public Remarks)

The supervisor in the White House press office called the alteration “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices” in an email obtained by the AP.

In a transcript originally shared by the WH, they claim the president was calling Trump’s rhetoric garbage. That puts a lot of weight on the apostrophe in “supporter’s” here below when it clearly sounds like Biden is starting a new thought. @DailyCaller previously reported that… https://t.co/ehTL3tHZZr

— Reagan Reese (@reaganreese_) October 30, 2024

Axios’s Alex Thompson also won the Aldo Beckman Award for overall excellence for his coverage on Joe Biden’s mental decline. (RELATED: Melodramatic White House Reporters Embrace New Level Of Trump-Fueled Absurdity)

In his acceptance speech, Thompson admonished D.C. journalists, including himself, for not seeing the decline earlier and covering it more intensely.

“President Biden’s decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said.

“We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.

.@AlexThomp: “President Biden’s decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception…We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.” #whcd #nerdprom pic.twitter.com/L9CtbB3HIZ

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 27, 2025

New York Times photojournalist Doug Mills won an award for presidential news coverage by a visual journalist for a photo.

His photo of Joe Biden leaving the podium after signing a $95 billion aid package to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

WHCD judges called the photo “somber” and noted that it captured the many issues Biden was juggling at the time, including factions from his own party to bow out of the presidential race.

President Donald Trump did not attend the event, continuing a personal tradition he’s maintained through both of his terms.