A brief phone call, or the alleged absence of one, has become the latest flashpoint between President Donald Trump and the Washington press corps. ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, one of the longest-serving White House reporters in the business, publicly described receiving a call from Trump the morning after a shooting near the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump has since denied making any such call, taking to his Truth Social platform to dispute the account and call Karl’s reporting dishonest.
Karl shared his version of events in a video posted to social media on April 26, describing how Trump reached him just after 7 a.m. the morning following the incident and asked whether he was doing all right. Karl also said that Trump expressed a desire for unity in the aftermath and suggested that the WHCA dinner should be rescheduled.
More than a week after that account circulated publicly, Trump responded by rejecting the story outright. He argued that the shooting was an attempt on his own life, not Karl’s, and questioned why he would have placed such a call. He further claimed that it was Karl who had actually called him, and that he had not answered. He characterized the account as an attempt by Karl to elevate his own profile and used the exchange to renew his criticism of ABC News as a whole.
The WHCA dinner shooting and its aftermath
The incident that prompted the disputed call involved a shooting in the vicinity of the WHCA dinner on the evening of April 25. The suspect, identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen, was charged the following Monday with attempting to assassinate Trump, along with additional federal firearms violations. Allen appeared in federal court Monday for a detention hearing, one day after being removed from suicide watch at the D.C. Jail.
Investigators confirmed that a bullet that struck a Secret Service agent during the confrontation was definitively traced to Allen’s weapon. Authorities said the evidence showed clear intent to harm the agent and to reach the president. The determination added a significant layer to what was already one of the most alarming security incidents in recent memory involving the White House press community.
Calls to reschedule and a relationship under strain
Despite the tension surrounding the event, several White House correspondents have expressed support for holding the dinner again. The WHCA’s board, led by its president Weijia Jiang of CBS News, confirmed it is actively working through options for a rescheduled gathering.
Separately, Trump and Karl spoke again by phone on Monday, a conversation that touched on several international developments including reports of Iranian drones and missiles targeting the United Arab Emirates and a cargo ship incident in the Strait of Hormuz involving a South Korean vessel. The fact that the two spoke at all, even amid a public dispute over the nature of a previous conversation, underscores just how entangled the relationship between Trump and the Washington press corps remains, contentious, complicated, and impossible to fully disentangle regardless of how either side frames it.
The dispute over the WHCA call is unlikely to be resolved to either party’s satisfaction. What it does reveal is something more familiar. In an era where competing accounts of even small moments are treated as consequential battlegrounds, a single phone call, or the denial of one, can generate as much news as the events surrounding it.
