President Donald Trump stood by awkwardly ahead of his speech on Friday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Wall Street Journal reporters won awards for their coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, reporting which inspired the president to launch a since-dismissed $10 billion defamation lawsuit last year.

Journal reporters were honored multiple times during the Friday dinner. The president often shrugged or smiled as their reporting was described, and he shook some of the winners’ hands.

When it was his time to speak, the president joked that it had “not been an easy evening” reliving those moments.

“All these awards,” he said. “Do I have a say?”

The president also used his remarks to praise freedom of speech and condemn the gunman who stormed the original Correspondents’ Dinner in April, prompting organizers to reschedule.

”In this country, we believe in freedom of speech,” Trump said. “We settle our differences not with bullets, but with open and vigorous debate, and no deranged loser with a gun will ever change that. We can’t let that ever happen.”

Reporters speaking before the president offered a mix of jokes and sincerity.

Weijia Jiang of CBS News, who recently finished her term as president of the Correspondents’ Association, joked that the evening’s entertainment, mentalist Oz Pearlman, didn’t need to guess to president’s phone number.

“Half the reporters in this room already have it,” she said, a reference to Trump’s penchant for taking unexpected calls at all hours from a variety of reporters.

The new WHCA president, Jacqueline Heinrich of FOX News, thanked President Trump for taking part in a celebration of First Amendment freedoms, and she spoke of the importance of journalism in broadening understanding at a time of rising political violence.

“The freedoms we cherish must never be taken for granted,” she said.

Despite the night’s theme of honoring the independent press, the White House has consistently clashed with the media.

Earlier this week, the government withdrew a controversial attempt to compel three New York Times journalists to testify about their sources, after they reported on concerns surrounding the president’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One replacement jet.

Last week, the president called for NBC and ABC to lose their broadcast licenses for not airing his recent, highly speculative primetime address about what he claimed was foreign “election interference.”

Both before and after his election, Trump has repeatedly sued news outlets over coverage he disagrees with.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has consistently worked to deny journalists the access to defense officials and facilities they enjoyed under previous administrations.

During the dinner on Friday, CBS News’s Jiang gave a special shoutout to the Pentagon reporters in the room.

“Your work is invaluable, especially as our nation is at war,” she said.

Critics have also accused the Trump administration of empowering the president’s political allies to take over important parts of the U.S. media and social media ecosystems and push them in a more conservative direction, including approving a deal for backers to take over the parent company of CBS News and blessing a pending attempt to buy the parent company of CNN.

Cole Thomas Allen has been charged with attempting to assassinate the president in connection with the April 25 attack on the original 2026 correspondents’ dinner.

Allen pleaded not guilty to all four counts against him in May.