Amber Ruffin Breaks Silence On WHCD: ‘I Would Have Been So Terrifically Mean’

If you’re a comic, especially if you’re a talented comic, you don’t back down when someone tries to shut you up.

Amber Ruffin is a talented comic.

And Monday night, making a drop-in appearance with Seth Meyers (for whom she’s been a writer since he started on NBC’s Late Night eleven years ago), Ruffin stepped out and spoke up—not just against the President of the United States but also the journalists who cover him.

As people who’ve been following the running series of news stories about capitulations to Trump Administration pressure tactics know, Ruffin was scheduled to be this year’s headliner at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, but was told over the  weekend that her services would no longer be needed. (In his announcement, WHCA president Eugene Daniels of Politico wrote that he wanted to ensure that the night’s focus was “not on the politics of division.”)

In essence, she was disinvited due to her outspoken opposition to Administration policies.

Luckily she still has an outlet (two, actually)—and few outlets have been more unreservedly outspoken on the political upheaval taking place in Washington under Trump than Meyers’ Late Night.

Ruffin did not mention names when she sat down with Meyers last night. She simply made the point that the position the WHCA took about her appearance was antithetical to the notion of a free press.

Meyers’ set up: “The whole reason we have a free press is so we can report stories as they actually happened.”

Ruffin’s response: “No, we have a free press so we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners.”

The premise was Meyers reporting about a robbery at a bodega and Ruffin objecting because he didn’t give “both sides” of the story. Meyers said the news was true. The store was broken into, cash stolen, an ATM set on fire.

Ruffin offered ludicrous “other side” defenses, like the ATM attack was an effort to fight inflation.

Meyers argued, “When people are objectively terrible, we should be able to point that out.”

Ruffin said she thought that too—on Friday. By Monday, she said she’d learned that you couldn’t just root for the children singers in “The Sound of Music” you also have to root for “the other people.”

Meyers made sure the point wasn’t missed: “You mean the Nazis?”

Ruffin: “Calling them that is so one-sided.”

Ahem. Somebody will be on Fox this morning saying Amber Ruffin called the Trump Administration Nazis.

Which may make the WCHA feel validated in its disinvitation.

Ruffin was not hiding the fact that she would be going to be one-sided. She had said as much last week in an interview with The Daily Beast where she referred to the Administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers.”

Naturally that raised hackles at the White House, which is in the process of eviscerating the standing of the correspondents’ association, elbowing out legit organizations like the AP in favor of all pro-Trump all-the-time outlets.

Many other comics who have been the featured speaker at this dinner (which has received its share of mockery for mixing journalists with celebrities for a fun evening of self-celebration) have unloaded on a sitting president. But none had telegraphed his or her intentions quite as vocally as Ruffin.

Points to her for honesty. It certainly seems like she was going to be all in on skewering Trump and Musk and other MAGA figures. When that has happened in the past, the WHCA has been discomfited, notably when Stephen Colbert brilliantly satirized the Bush Administration. He didn’t get many laughs in the room, but killed on TV.

Given the poisoned atmosphere across every element of our political institutions and the open warfare the Trump Administration has declared against journalists and journalism organizations it doesn’t like, the odds were massive that Ruffin’s speech would have tossed barrels of oil on the fire.

She more or less guaranteed that last night:

“I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history, and deport your friends, you’re supposed to call it out. But I was wrong.”

And she said, “Glad to find it out now. Because if they had let me give that speech, oooh baby, I would have been so terrifically mean.”

The correspondents’ organization’s leadership is likely happy to have dodged that bullet. All they have to worry about now is how much they will be mocked, instead of the Administration.

As when Ruffin finished up last night, saying she going to return the dress she bought for dinner and say the tags blew off in the wind.

Meyers said: “Yeah, but that’s lying, Amber, that’s wrong.”

Ruffin: “Uh, uh uh, you can’t say that.  That’s journalism.”

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