President praises decision by organisers to replace comedians with historians after Michelle Wolf took aim at him last year

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

President Donald Trump has suggested he might attend the White House correspondents’ dinner after organisers said they would feature a historian, not a comedian, at its annual event to be held next spring.

The president said on Twitter that it was “good first step of a dying evening and tradition” that the change had been made. It comes after comedian Michelle Wolf angered Trump administration officials with a blistering routine last year.

“So-called comedian Michelle Wolf bombed so badly last year at the white house correspondents’ dinner that this year, for the first time in decades, they will have an author instead of a comedian,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post. “Maybe I will go?”

White House correspondents' dinner ditches comedians for a history lesson Read more

Trump has repeatedly derided some media organisations as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”, and who has refused to attend the dinner during his first two years in office.

On Monday, the White House Correspondents’ Association said Ron Chernow, who has written biographies of presidents George Washington and Ulysses Grant and founding father Alexander Hamilton, had been asked to speak on freedom of the press at the black-tie affair in April.

The decision breaks with the association’s long-standing tradition of having a comic roast the president and the press at the dinner.

Wolf’s performance was not the first time comics at the dinner have riled their targets. Stephen Colbert, Wanda Sykes and Seth Meyers have spoken at the dinner and also had their detractors.

Although the dinner has become a high-profile event on Washington’s social calendar, it is primarily a fund-raiser to earn money for college journalism scholarships, journalism awards and to pay for other programs sponsored by the WHCA, which represents journalists covering the White House.