Why I’m skipping the White House Correspondents

I turned down a seat at Washington’s most exclusive table and chose a memorial instead. What that decision says about power, access, and the stories we tell ourselves this weekend.

Welcome back to The Red Letter from Washington.

Over the next few days, I’ll be attending a number of White House Correspondents’ Dinner events and I’ll be reporting from inside them here.

But I won’t be at the dinner itself.

I turned down a generous invitation this year. It didn’t feel right.

Not in a moment when the president has escalated attacks on the press. Not in a room designed to celebrate journalism while those same institutions are being undermined in real time.

One of the advantages of being independent is that I don’t have to sit there for anyone else. I don’t have a corporate parent. I don’t have bosses who expect me at a table.

I work for you.

Instead, I’ll be attending the memorial service for Virginia Giuffre.

I remember the moment I learned she had died last year. It was the night before the Correspondents’ Dinner. I was at a party when I saw the news—my stomach dropped. I walked out. A friend stopped me to check in, but I went home.

The next day, I wrote a tribute to her.
(You can read it here.)

If you believe in this kind of independent journalism—reporting that isn’t shaped by access, advertisers, or institutional pressure—consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s what allows me to do this work without fear or favor.

In the lead-up to this weekend, I reported a piece for Vanity Fair on something that felt, at first glance, like a party story but turned out to be something more revealing about Washington itself.

Grindr is making its formal debut in Washington during a Republican administration, with GOP control of both the House and Senate, in a political culture still shaped by the language of evangelical conservatism and, increasingly, an explicit push by figures like Pete Hegseth for the re-Christianization of public institutions.

It is not, on paper, an environment designed to welcome a West Hollywood–born hookup app.

President Donald Trump has already disrupted global HIV programs, authorizing hundreds of millions in cuts to PEPFAR before partially reversing course. At the same time, voices openly critical of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the military have been elevated within the administration.

This is not the era of effortless corporate Pride messaging.

Which may be precisely why Grindr has chosen this moment to arrive, fully dressed for the room, and determined to be taken seriously.

For years, Grindr existed in Washington the way many things do here: ubiquitous, quietly influential, and rarely acknowledged in the open.

In 2010, as the debate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was reaching its final stretch, I was a young reporter at the Washington Examiner. I made a video walking around the Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon with the app open, watching it light up with nearby users.

The point wasn’t to out anyone.

It was to document what many in Washington already knew but rarely said aloud: there were gay politicians, political appointees, and civil servants using this new app called Grindr, which had launched just a year earlier.

Depending on who you asked, it was either a hookup app for Washington’s discreet gay underground—or a kind of unofficial floor plan of power, quietly mapping who was where, and when, inside the institutions shaping national policy.

Grindr didn’t just reflect a social network.

It exposed one of Washington’s oldest tells: the distance between how the city presents itself—and how it actually behaves after hours.

For years, Grindr thrived in that gap.

Now, it’s trying something more ambitious: translating cultural saturation into political legitimacy.

You can read my full piece in Vanity Fair here.

And I’ll be reporting from inside this weekend’s events—what’s happening, who’s showing up, and what it all says about power, access, and the stories Washington tells itself.

Stay tuned.